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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75583 ***
+
+
+The Informer
+
+by Liam O’Flaherty
+
+published by New York: Alfred A. Knopf (1925)
+Copyright 1925 by Liam O’Flaherty
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+It was three minutes to six o’clock in the evening of the fifteenth of
+March 192‒.
+
+Francis Joseph McPhillip ran up the concrete steps leading to the
+glass-panelled swing door that acted as street entrance to the Dunboy
+Lodging House. The House, as it was called in Dublin, among criminal
+and pauperized circles, was a grey concrete building of four stories.
+It stood on the left-hand side of a wide wind-swept asphalt lane off
+B—— Road on the south side of the city. A maze of slum streets
+surrounded it. An indefinable smell of human beings living in a
+congested area filled the air around it. From the building itself, a
+smell of food and of floors being scrubbed with soap and hot water
+emanated.
+
+A drizzling rain was falling from a black bulging sky. Now and again a
+flock of hailstones, driven by a sudden gust of querulous wind,
+clattered down the lane, falling in little dancing groups on the hard,
+perspiring asphalt.
+
+McPhillip ran up the four steps and peered into the hall hurriedly
+through the glass door. He put his face so close to the glass that his
+excited breath caused an immediate blur of vapour on the frozen pane.
+Then he turned about. He crouched against the angle of the doorway and
+peered around the corner of the wall, up the lane through which he had
+just come. He wanted to find out whether anybody was following him. He
+was a murderer.
+
+He had killed the secretary of the local branch of the Farmers’ Union
+during the farm labourers’ strike at M—— in the previous October.
+Since then he had been hiding out in the mountains with a group of men
+who were evading arrest, brigands, criminals and political refugees.
+He had just come into Dublin half an hour previously on a goods train.
+The conductor of the train was a member of the Revolutionary
+Organization, to which McPhillip himself had belonged when he shot the
+Farmers’ Union Secretary.
+
+He saw nobody of account in the lane. An old woman crossed near the
+far end. She had a black shawl about her head and in her hand a milk
+jug, with a corner of the shawl drawn across its mouth to keep out the
+rain. A man was singing forlornly, facing the kerb on the right-hand
+side, with his cap held out in front of him. He was begging, but
+nobody took any notice of him.
+
+McPhillip’s eyes darted about everywhere, with the speed and acuteness
+of one who has perfected his detective sensibilities by necessity and
+long practice. The street was quite safe. He sighed and turned about
+to survey the interior of the House.
+
+He was a man of middle size and slightly built, but his shoulders were
+broad enough for a giant. His body narrowed down from the shoulders,
+so that the hips and waist were totally out of proportion to the upper
+part of the body. His right leg opened outwards in a curve below the
+knee and he placed the toe of the right foot on the ground before the
+heel when he walked, so that his walk had the crouching appearance of
+a wild animal stalking in a forest. His face was thin and sallow. His
+hair was black and cropped close. His eyebrows were black and bushy.
+His eyelashes were long and they continually drooped over his eyes.
+When his eyelashes drooped his eyes were blue, sharp and fierce. But
+when he raised his lashes for a moment to think of something distant
+and perhaps imaginary, his eyes were large, wistful and dreamy. They
+were soft and full of a sorrow that was unfathomable. His jaws were
+square, sharp and fleshless. His lips were thin and set tightly. This
+gave the lower part of his face a ferocious appearance. His nose was
+long and straight. His cheeks were hollow and on the cheekbones a
+bright flush appeared when he was seized with a fit of hard, dry
+coughing which he tried to suppress.
+
+He was dressed in a shabby pair of wrinkled navy blue trousers and a
+fawn-coloured, shabby raincoat, buttoned up around his throat like a
+uniform. His boots were old and thin. They creaked with moisture
+soaked in through their torn soles. He wore a grey tweed cap. Under
+his left armpit he carried an automatic pistol in a leather holster.
+The pistol hung from a lanyard that was suspended from his neck.
+
+As he stood looking in through the door, the fingers of his right hand
+were thrust in between the first and second buttons of his raincoat.
+The tips of the fingers rested on the cold butt of the automatic.
+
+Within the hall three old men were waiting in a row outside the closed
+glass window of the office on the right-hand side. The nearest old man
+to the door wore a brown pauper’s uniform. Both his eyes had cataracts
+and he seemed to be on the point of going into a faint. He was leaning
+on a stick and his head kept bobbing like a man that is in a drunken
+stupor and is on the point of falling asleep. The second old man wore
+a torn old dress suit. He looked like a waiter thrown out of
+employment through old age. He had a sharp lean face. The farthest old
+man was dressed in a medley of unspeakable rags and he shook his body
+continually trying to scratch himself on the insides of his clothes.
+The three of them stood in silence. Beyond them, four more concrete
+steps led to a long passage through the building. A corridor crossed
+the passage at the far end. Men passed along the corridor now and
+again in groups.
+
+McPhillip was about to push through the door when the glass panel was
+pulled up with a screech and a man’s head appeared at the window. The
+man cracked his thumb and forefinger and motioned the nearest old man
+to approach, the old man dressed in rags. The old man started and
+cried out in a weak, childish voice: “Oh be Janey I’d forgotten.”
+Smiling weakly and muttering to himself he began to rummage among his
+rags. The man at the window looked at him, pursed up his lips angrily
+and disappeared.
+
+Presently he reappeared from around the corner of the office. He came
+up to the old man and stood in front of him with his hands on his hips
+and his legs spread wide apart. His neat blue trousers were perfectly
+creased. He was in his shirt sleeves, so that his diamond sleeve links
+and the large diamond in his tie flashed in the half darkness. His
+hair was glued to his head with perfumed oil. Its odour pervaded the
+whole hallway. He looked at the old man with an expression of mixed
+contempt and anger. The two other old men began to snigger fawningly
+and tried to appear to have absolutely no connection with the ragged
+old man.
+
+At last the ragged old man found a red handkerchief, and in his
+excitement he could not undo the knot that bound it together in a
+ball.
+
+“Here,” he cried, holding out the handkerchief to the clerk, “there
+are five pennies and four halfpennies there. Me fingers are all stiff
+with the rheumatism an’ I can’t untie it. Maybe ye’d do it for me for
+th’ honour o’ God?”
+
+Then he looked up into the clerk’s face with his mouth open. But the
+clerk, without taking any notice of the handkerchief, was looking at
+the old man’s face as if he were going to strike him. The old man
+began to tremble.
+
+“Get out of here,” yelled the clerk suddenly in a thunderous voice.
+
+Then he became motionless again. The old man began to babble and
+shiver. He turned about and shuffled down the steps to the door,
+scratching his shoulder-blades against his clothes as he moved. He
+went down two steps and then paused uncertainly and looked behind him.
+Then he shuddered, took another step, lost his balance and slipped. He
+slithered to the door on his buttocks. The other two old men began to
+laugh and titter. The clerk scowled at them. “What are ye laughing
+at?” he cried. They stopped immediately. “Hey you,” he continued,
+pointing his finger at the ragged old man, who had reached the street
+outside and was standing irresolutely on the kerb looking back over
+his shoulders. “If I catch you here again, you old fool, I’ll hand you
+over to the police. Go away now and get into the workhouse where you
+belong. Huh!”
+
+The old man wrinkled up his monkey-like face into a grimace of
+surprise and misery. He cast a terrified look at the haggard face of
+McPhillip, that peered at him out of the angle of the wall to the left
+of the door. Then he mumbled something and set off down the lane at a
+broken trot. The other two old men in the hall began to whisper to one
+another as soon as the clerk turned his back and walked back into the
+office.
+
+“Be the holy,” said one, “he should be shot, wha?”
+
+“So he should,” whined the other old man, “the dirty, rotten—to be
+goin’ about like that.”
+
+Then they shuffled up to the window for their bed tickets. The clerk
+swore at them and called them filthy names, but they kept apologizing
+to him and sniggering.
+
+While the two old men were getting their bed tickets at the window,
+McPhillip pushed through the door quietly and slipped along the hall.
+He turned to the right at the far end. He stopped there. He leaned up
+against the wall casually, took a cigarette from his pocket and lit
+it. He looked around examining the passage. It was a wide corridor
+with a concrete floor and walls of glazed brick. There were windows at
+regular intervals opening on a large yard at the rear of the building.
+In the alcoves formed by the windows seats were placed. By the
+opposite wall there were spittoons placed at equal distances of three
+yards or so. Men were strewn along the passage in groups, some sitting
+on the seats conversing in low voices, others walking up and down
+singly or in pairs, with their eyes on the ground and their hands
+muffed behind their backs in their coat sleeves. They were all
+wretchedly dressed and melancholy. Some were quite young, but their
+faces had already assumed the dejected appearance that is usually
+found only in the faces of old men who have been disappointed in life.
+
+Puffing at his cigarette slowly, McPhillip examined the hall and the
+men who passed, with the same quick, sharp cunning with which he had
+examined the street. Again he could see nobody that aroused his
+interest. Again he sighed gently and moved away to the right. He
+entered a large room through a swing door.
+
+The room was crowded. It was furnished with long tables and wooden
+forms, like a café for the working class. There were newspapers on
+some tables. On others there were games or draughts and dominoes. Men
+sat at all the tables. Some read. Others played games. The majority,
+however, sat in silence, their eyes staring vacantly in front of them,
+contemplating the horror of their lives. Those who could find no seat
+stood about the tables, watching the progress of the games, with their
+hands in their pockets and their faces set in an expression of stolid
+and absent-minded indifference.
+
+McPhillip walked about from one table to another, his cigarette in his
+left hand, the fingers of his right hand clutching the butt of his
+automatic, between the two top buttons of his raincoat. Nobody noticed
+him. The melancholy eyes, that were raised casually to look, saw only
+another shabby wreck like themselves. Even had his identity been
+suddenly disclosed by means of a loud trumpet to the men in that room,
+it is questionable whether the news would have occasioned excitement
+in more than a few breasts. Casual workers, casual criminals and
+broken old men, their connection with the ordered scheme of civilized
+life, with its moral laws and its horror of crime, was so thin and
+weak that they were unable to feel the interest that murder arouses in
+the tender breasts of our wives and sisters.
+
+McPhillip examined the room carefully without discovering what he
+wanted. Then he walked out into the corridor again. He entered another
+room that was used by the occupants of the lodging-house for the
+purpose of writing letters. That room was empty. Then he descended a
+stairway to the lavatories and bathrooms. Here men were shaving and
+washing themselves. He walked about and discovered nobody. He came up
+again into the corridor and entered the dining-room.
+
+The dining-room was very large and furnished with small deal tables
+and long forms of the same material. The wooden floor was covered with
+sawdust, like the floor of a slum public-house. Here and there the
+sawdust was mixed with refuse that had been swept from the tables. At
+the far end of the room a great number of men were gathered around an
+immense range, some with frying-pans in their hands awaiting their
+turn to cook, others rushing about attending to cooking utensils that
+were already on the range. They all had knives, spoons and forks in
+their hands. They were jostling, perspiring, cursing, laughing and
+scratching themselves. There was a great din of voices and a smell of
+food and of human bodies.
+
+At the other end of the room there was a counter and behind the
+counter a large bright kitchen, shining bright with white crockery,
+polished brasses and the clean white uniforms of the women who served
+in it. Three young women were there cooking and serving food, for the
+lodgers who had not the means or the inclination to prepare their own
+food. These lodgers stood at the counter buying tea, bread and butter,
+cooked eggs and meat. They also purchased knives, forks, spoons and
+salt, because these necessities were not provided by the management in
+the lodging-house, owing to the moral character of the lodgers, except
+on payment of a fixed sum, which was returned at the conclusion of the
+meal, when the articles were handed back at the counter.
+
+McPhillip walked down across the room to the far side. He had seen the
+man he sought at the first glance. He walked straight to a table by
+the wall at the far side. At that table a young man of thirty or so
+was eating his supper.
+
+He ate off an enamelled plate that was loaded high with potatoes,
+coarse cabbage and a large piece of boiled bacon. A great steam rose
+from the plate and twisted up towards the ceiling in front of the
+man’s face. The man was dressed in a suit of blue dungarees, with a
+white muffler wound round and round his neck. He had a close-cropped
+bullet-shaped head, fair hair and dark eyebrows. The eyebrows were
+just single tufts, one over the centre of each eye. They grew long and
+narrowed to a single hair, like the ends of waxed moustaches. They
+were just like ominous snouts, and they had more expression than the
+dim little blue eyes that were hidden away behind their scowling
+shadows. The face was bronzed red and it was covered by swellings that
+looked like humps at a distance. These humps came out on the forehead,
+on the cheekbones, on the chin and on either side of the neck below
+the ears. On close observation, however, they almost disappeared in
+the general glossy colour of the brownish red skin, that looked as if
+there were several tiers of taut skin covering the face. The nose was
+short and bulbous. The mouth was large. The lips were thick and they
+fitted together in such a manner that the mouth gave the face an
+expression of being perpetually asleep. His body was immense, with
+massive limbs and bulging muscles pushing out here and there, like
+excrescences of the earth breaking the expected regularity of a
+country-side. He sat upright in his seat, with his large square head
+bolted on to his squat neck, like an iron stanchion riveted to a deck.
+
+He stared straight in front of him as he ate. He held his fork by the
+handle, upright, in his left hand. He rapped the table with the end of
+the fork, as if he were keeping time with the rapid crunching of his
+jaws. But as soon as he saw McPhillip, his jaws stopped moving and the
+hand holding the fork dropped noiselessly to the table. His face
+closed up and his body became absolutely motionless.
+
+McPhillip sat down at the opposite side of the table. He did not speak
+and he did not express recognition by any sign or movement of his
+body. But he knew the man quite well. They were bosom friends. The man
+was Gypo Nolan, McPhillip’s companion during the strike of
+farm-labourers, when McPhillip had killed the secretary of the
+Farmers’ Union. Gypo Nolan had once been a policeman in Dublin, but he
+had been dismissed owing to a suspicion at Headquarters that he was in
+league with the Revolutionary Organization and had given information
+to them relative to certain matters that had leaked out. Since then he
+had been an active member of the Revolutionary Organization and had
+always acted with Francis Joseph McPhillip, so that they were known in
+revolutionary circles as the “Devil’s Twins.”
+
+“Well, Gypo,” said McPhillip at last, “how is things?”
+
+McPhillip’s voice was cracked and weak, but it had a fierce sincerity
+that gave it immense force, like the force in the chirping of a tiny
+bird whose nest is being robbed.
+
+“Did ye leave them messages I gave ye?” he continued after a moment,
+during which he gasped for breath. “I didn’t hear anythin’ from home
+since I saw ye that evenin’ I had to take to the hills. What’s doin’,
+Gypo?”
+
+Gypo stared in silence for several moments, breathing slowly, with
+open mouth and distended eyes. He never spoke. Then he made a strange
+sound, like a suppressed exclamation, in his throat. He slowly cut a
+large potato in four pieces with his knife. He transferred one piece
+to his mouth on the tip of his knife. He began to chew slowly. Then he
+stopped chewing suddenly and spoke. It was a deep thunderous voice.
+
+“Where the divil did ye come from, Frankie?” he said.
+
+“It don’t matter where I come from,” cried McPhillip in an irritated
+tone. “I got no time to waste passin’ the compliments o’ the season. I
+came in here to get wise to all the news. Tell us all ye know. First,
+tell me . . . wait a minute. How about them messages? Did ye deliver
+them? Don’t mind that grub. Man alive, are ye a savage or what? Here I
+am with the cops after me for me life an’ ye go on eatin’ yer spuds.
+Lave down that damn knife or I’ll plug ye. Come on, I’m riskin’ me
+life to come in here and ask ye a question. Get busy an’ tell me all
+about it.”
+
+Gypo sighed easily and wiped his mouth with the back of his right
+sleeve. Then he put his knife on the table and swallowed his mouthful.
+
+“Ye were always a cranky fellah,” he growled, “an’ ye don’t seem to be
+improvin’, with the spring weather. I’ll tell ye if ye hold on a
+minute. I delivered yer messages, to yer father an’ mother and to the
+Executive Committee. Yer ol’ man gev me dog’s abuse and drov’ me outa
+the house, an’ he cursed ye be bell, book an’ candle light. Yer mother
+followed me out cryin’ an’ put half a quid into me hand to give to ye.
+I had no way o’ findin’ ye an’ I was hungry mesel’, so I spent it.
+Well——”
+
+McPhillip interrupted with a muttered curse. Then he was seized with a
+fit of coughing. When the fit was over, Gypo went on.
+
+“Well,” continued Gypo. “Ye know yersel’ what happened with the
+Executive Committee. They sent a man out to tell ye. I wouldn’t mind
+them sendin’ a letter to the papers sayin’ they had nothin’ to do with
+the strike. It ud only be all swank anyway, an’ who cares? But I
+declare to Christ they near had me plugged when I went in to report.
+Commandant Gallagher was goin’ to send down men to plug ye too, but
+lots o’ the other fellahs got around him and he didn’t. Anyway I was
+fired out o’ the Organization as well as yersel’, although ye know
+yersel’, Frankie, that I had nothin’ to do with firin’ that shot.
+An’——”
+
+“What the—” began McPhillip angrily, rapping the table; but again he
+began to cough. Gypo went on without taking notice of the coughing.
+
+“The police arrested me, but they could find no evidence, so they gev
+me an awful beatin’ and threw me out. I ben wanderin’ around since
+without a dog to lick me trousers, half starvin’!”
+
+“What do I want to know about the Executive Committee?” grumbled
+McPhillip angrily, recovering his breath. “I don’t want to hear
+anything about executive committees or revolutionary organizations, me
+curse on the lot o’ them. I want to hear about me father an’ mother.
+What about ’em, Gypo?”
+
+Gypo expanded his thick under lip and stared at McPhillip with
+distended eyes. His eyes seemed to hold an expression of sadness in
+their dim recesses, but it was hard to say. The face was so crude and
+strong that the expression that might be termed sadness in another
+face was mere wonder in his. For the first time he had noticed the
+pallor of McPhillip’s face, the hectic flush, the fits of coughing,
+the jerky movements and the evident terror in the eyes that used to be
+so fearless.
+
+“Frankie,” cried Gypo in his deep, slow, passionless voice, “yer sick.
+Man alive, ye look as if ye were dyin’.”
+
+McPhillip started and looked about him hurriedly as if he expected to
+see death there behind his back waiting to pounce upon him.
+
+“Have a bite,” continued Gypo, “’twill warm ye up.”
+
+At the same time he himself began to eat again fiercely, like a great
+strong animal, tackling the solitary meal of its day. The large red
+hands with just stumps of fingers held the knife and fork so
+ponderously that those frail instruments seemed to run the danger of
+being crushed, like some costly thing picked up on the tip of an
+elephant’s trunk. But McPhillip did not follow the invitation. He
+looked angrily at the food for several seconds with wrinkled forehead,
+as if he were trying to remember what it was and what it was for, and
+then he spoke again.
+
+“I know I’m dyin’, Gypo, an’ that’s why I came in. I got the
+consumption.” Gypo started. He was struck at that moment by an insane
+and monstrous idea. “I came in to get some money from me mother. An’ I
+wanted to see her before I die. Good God, it was awful, Gypo, out
+there on them hills all the winter, with me gun in me hand night an’
+day, sleeping in holes on the mountains, with the winds blowin’ about
+me all night, screechin’ like a pack o’ devils, an’ every blast o’
+them winds spoke with a man’s voice, an’ I lyin’ there listenin’ to
+them. Good God——”
+
+Again he began to cough and he had to stop. Gypo was not listening to
+him. He had not heard a word. A monstrous idea had prowled into his
+head, like an uncouth beast straying from a wilderness into a
+civilized place where little children are alone. He did not hear
+McPhillip’s words or his coughing, although the monstrous idea was in
+relation to McPhillip.
+
+“So I said to mesel’, that I might as well chance me arm be comin’
+into town as lyin’ out there, starvin’ to death with the cold an’
+hunger an’ this cough. So I came along here to see ye, Gyp, first, so
+as to get a bead on what’s doin’. Have they got a guard on the house?”
+
+“Divil a guard,” replied Gypo suddenly, and then he started and
+stretched out his right hand towards McPhillip with a little
+exclamation. His eyes were wild and his mouth was wide open like the
+mouth of a man looking at a spectre. Gypo’s mind was looking at that
+uncouth ogre that was prowling about in his brain.
+
+McPhillip leaned across the table. Gradually his eyes narrowed into an
+intense stare of ferocity. His lips curled up and his forehead
+wrinkled. He began to tremble.
+
+“What is it, Gypo?” he hissed. “Tell me, Gyp, or I’ll . . .” He made a
+rapid movement with the wrist of the hand that clutched his automatic.
+“The cops are after me, Gyp, an’ I’m dyin’, so I don’t mind how I use
+the twenty-four rounds I got left. I’ve notched their noses so they
+can make a quare hole. There’s one for mesel’ too.” He shuddered as if
+at the thought of a tender pleasure. Then he scowled fiercely and half
+drew the butt of his pistol from his pocket. His voice was almost
+inaudible. “Tell me the truth about how things stand without any jig
+actin’ or I’ll plug ye.”
+
+He glared at Gypo, his hand on his pistol, his right arm rigid to the
+shoulder, ready to draw the gun and fire in one movement. Gypo stared
+him in the eyes without any emotion, either of fear or of surprise.
+With the nail of his right forefinger he abstracted a string of meat
+from between two teeth. He spluttered with his lips and then he
+shrugged his shoulders. The spectre had suddenly gone out of his mind
+without his being able to make head or tail of it.
+
+“No use talkin’ like that to me, Frankie,” he murmured lazily. “The
+only reason why I didn’t want to say anythin’ was because I didn’t
+like to . . .” Again the ghoulish thing came into his mind and he
+stopped with a start. But almost immediately he continued in a forced
+voice. He was beginning to be ashamed of that spectre as if he had
+already given way to the horrid suggestions it made, although he did
+not at all comprehend those suggestions. “I didn’t like to maybe send
+ye into harm’s way. Ye see, I don’t know if there’s a guard on yer
+father’s house or if there’s not. I generally knock around Titt
+Street, but I haven’t been near No. 44 since that night I went there
+with yer message an’ yer ol’ man told me never to darken his door
+again. There may be a guard on it or there may be no guard on it. But
+if I told ye there wasn’t and ye went there and got nabbed, ye know——”
+
+“What are ye drivin’ at, Gypo?” growled McPhillip suspiciously.
+
+“Nothin’ at all,” said Gypo with a great deep laugh. “But it’s how
+ye’ve come in on me so sudden, an’ I don’t know right what I’m talkin’
+about. Ye see, I’m all mixed up for the last six months, wanderin’
+around here, without a mate that ud give me a tanner for a flop if I
+were to die o’ the cold lyin’ in O’Connell’s Street with a foot o’
+frost on the ground. They——”
+
+“Oh, shut up about yersel’ an’ the frost an’ tell us somethin’.”
+
+“Now don’t get yer rag out, Frankie. I was comin’ to that. I was
+comin’ to it, man. They held me up in the street the other day
+and had a long talk about ye. They’re after ye yet all right.
+Sergeant McCartney an’ another fellah from Sligo was there. That
+Detective-Sergeant McCartney is a bad lot. Huh, he’s a rascal, an’ no
+goin’ behind a wall to say it. He swore to me that he’d get ye dead or
+alive. ‘I wouldn’t care much for yer job then,’ says I to him, just
+like that, an’ he gave me an eye that ud knock ye stiff.”
+
+“He says he’s goin’ to get me, did he?” murmured McPhillip dreamily.
+Suddenly his mind seemed to wander away and he lost interest in his
+present surroundings. His eyes rested vacantly on the table, about a
+foot away to the right.
+
+Gypo looked hurriedly at the spot upon which McPhillip’s eyes were
+fixed. He saw nothing. He looked back again at McPhillip’s face and
+wrinkled up his forehead. Then he made a noise in his throat and began
+to eat once more with great rapidity. He breathed on his food, to cool
+it, as he put it into his jaws. He made noises.
+
+McPhillip stared at the table for a long time. His right hand toyed
+nervously with the butt of his pistol. His left hand rapped the table.
+Then a strange sparkle came into his eyes. He laughed suddenly. It was
+a strange laugh. It made Gypo start.
+
+“What’s the matter, Frankie?” he asked in a terrified voice.
+
+“Nothin’ atall,” said McPhillip, shaking himself. “Gimme somethin’ t’
+eat.”
+
+He began to eat ravenously, using his penknife as a knife and fork. He
+had not eaten for a long time. He did not taste the food but gulped it
+down at a great speed.
+
+Gypo ate also, but he kept staring at McPhillip while he ate. Every
+time his wandering little eyes reached McPhillip’s eyes they narrowed
+and became very sharp. Then he would roll his tongue around in his
+cheek and make a sucking sound.
+
+At last McPhillip stopped eating. He wiped his penknife on his
+trousers and put it into his pocket.
+
+“Gypo,” he said slowly, “are there any cops watchin’ our house, the
+old man’s place in Titt Street?”
+
+Gypo shook his head three times in reply. His mouth was full. Then he
+swallowed his mouthful, he put his fork to his forehead and set to
+thinking.
+
+“Lemme see,” he said at last. “Yeh. They had two cops watchin’ the
+place until after Christmas. Then they took ’em off. They didn’t put
+any on since as far as I know, but I believe that a fellah goes around
+there now an’ again to make inquiries. O’ course they might have
+secret-service men on it as well. God only knows who’s givin’
+information to the Government now, an’ who isn’t. Ye never know who
+yer talkin’ to. I never in me life saw anythin’ like it. Tell ye what,
+Frankie, the workin’ class is not worth fightin’ for. They think yer
+gone to the United States, but all the same it might be dangerous
+goin’ down there now. I’m sorry I have no money to give ye, so as ye
+could——”
+
+“Where the divil did ye get all the gab?” cried McPhillip suddenly,
+looking suspiciously at Gypo. “I never knew ye to let out all that
+much talk in a day, or maybe a whole week. Are ye goin’ to the
+university now in yer spare time or what ails ye?”
+
+McPhillip began to rap the table again. There was silence. Gypo
+nonchalantly transferred the scraps from his plate to his mouth on the
+flat of his knife. When the plate was completely cleaned up he rattled
+the knife and fork on to it. Then he stuck out his massive chest and
+rubbed his palms along it.
+
+Suddenly McPhillip swore and jumped to his feet. He stood, as if in a
+dream, looking at the table for several moments. Gypo watched his
+face, with his little tufted eyebrows quivering. At the same time he
+cleaned his teeth with his left thumb-nail. At last McPhillip drew in
+a deep breath through his teeth, making a noise as if he were sucking
+ice.
+
+“Right,” he said, with his eyes still on the table. “My ould fellah is
+at home now, is he?”
+
+“Yes,” said Gypo. “I saw him yesterday. He was over in the ’Pool on a
+job, but he’s back this fortnight. I think he’s workin’ on a new house
+out in Rathmines.”
+
+“Right,” said McPhillip again. Then he raised his eyes, looked at Gypo
+fiercely and smiled in a curious fashion. “See ye again, Gypo, unless
+the cops get me.”
+
+As he spoke he seemed to think of something. His face quivered and
+darkened. Then he shrugged his shoulders and laughed outright. He
+nodded twice and turned on his heel. He strode hurriedly out of the
+room.
+
+Gypo looked after him for a long time without moving. He had finished
+cleaning his teeth. He just stared at the door through which McPhillip
+had disappeared. Then gradually his mind began to fill with
+suggestions. His forehead wrinkled up. His body began to fidget. At
+last he jumped to his feet. He collected the plate, the knife and fork
+and the salt. He walked into the passage and put them in a locker,
+which was provided by the management for the lodgers. The locker did
+not belong to Gypo. He had no locker because he was merely a casual
+lodger since he had no regular income to pay for a bed by the week.
+The locker belonged to a carter of Gypo’s acquaintance. Gypo had seen
+the man put his next-day’s dinner in the locker and go away without
+turning the key. Gypo knew also that the man would not be back until
+ten o’clock that night. So he took the dinner.
+
+He placed the things in the locker and walked away casually. He sat on
+the corner of a seat in one of the alcoves. He rummaged in the pockets
+of his dungarees and collected several minute scraps of cigarettes. He
+carefully unrolled the scraps, collecting all the tobacco in the palm
+of his right hand. Then he begged a cigarette paper from an old man
+who sat beside him. The old man had none and said so with an angry
+curse. Gypo wrinkled his forehead and sniffed as if he were smelling
+the old man. Then he turned to a young man who passed and requested a
+cigarette paper. The young man halted and supplied one grudgingly.
+Gypo took the paper in silence, without a word or a nod of thanks. He
+rolled his cigarette and lit it at the gas jet. Then he sat down
+again, crossed his legs, let his body go limp and began to smoke.
+
+His ears seemed to stick out very far, as he lay back limply in the
+seat, in the half-darkness of the corridor.
+
+For a minute the odour and the taste of the tobacco held him in a
+state of enjoyment. He did not think either of the fact that he had no
+bed for the night or of his meeting with McPhillip. Then gradually his
+forehead began to wrinkle and furrow. His little tufted eyebrows began
+to twitch. When he pulled at his cigarette his face was enshrouded in
+a bright glow and the humps on his face stood out, glistening and
+smooth. He began to shift about in his seat. First he uncrossed his
+legs. Then he crossed them again. He began to tap his knee with his
+right hand. He sighed. His cigarette wore out until it was burning his
+lips without his becoming aware of the fact. Then he spluttered it out
+of his mouth on to his chest and he jumped to his feet.
+
+He stood looking at the ground with his hands deep in his trousers
+pockets. He seemed to be deep in thought, but he was not thinking. At
+least there was no concrete idea fixed in his mind. Two facts rumbled
+about in his brain, making that loud primeval noise, which is the
+beginning of thought and which tired people experience when the jaded
+brain has spun out the last threads of its energy. There were two
+facts in his brain. First, the fact of his meeting with McPhillip.
+Second, the fact of his having no money to buy a bed for the night.
+
+These two facts stood together in an amorphous mass. But he could not
+summon up courage to tackle them and place them in proper
+juxtaposition and reason out their relationship. He just stood looking
+at the ground.
+
+Then a drunken bookmaker’s clerk named Shanahan brushed against him.
+He stepped aside with a muttered oath. He pulled one hand from his
+pocket to strike, with the fingers extended in the shape of a bird’s
+claws. Shanahan, doubled up in the middle by the helplessness of
+intoxication, stared at Gypo with blue eyes that had gone almost
+completely red. Gypo turned away with a shrug of his shoulders. At any
+other time he would gladly have availed himself of this opportunity of
+begging a shilling from Shanahan. Shanahan was always good for the
+loan of a shilling when he was drunk. A shilling would procure Gypo a
+bed for the night and leave a little for a light breakfast in the
+morning. Ten minutes ago, a _rencontre_ of this sort would have been a
+godsend to Gypo. But now, those two cursed facts stood in his brain,
+making him unconscious of everything else.
+
+He walked out of the House and up the lane towards B— Road.
+
+He walked with his hands deep in his pockets, slowly, with his thighs
+brushing on the insides as he walked. He seemed to haul his big boots
+after him, bringing them as near the ground as possible. His hips
+moved up and down as his feet went forward. His eyes were on the
+ground. His lips were distended outwards. His little torn, brown,
+slouch hat was perched incongruously on the top of his head, much too
+small for his large square skull, with the brim turned up closely all
+around. When a squall of wind, laden with little sharp hailstones,
+struck him across the face and body, his clothes puffed out and he
+curled up his short stubby nose in an angry grin.
+
+He was looking into the window of a saddler’s shop in Dame Street,
+when the relationship between the two facts became known to him. He
+was looking at a pair of bright spurs and his face contorted suddenly.
+His eyes bulged as if he were taken with a fit of terror. He looked
+about him suspiciously, as if he were about to steal something for the
+first time. Then he rushed away hurriedly. He moved through lanes and
+alleyways to the river. He crossed the street to the river wall. He
+leaned his elbows on the wall and spat into the dark water. With his
+chin resting on his arms, he stood perfectly still, thinking.
+
+He was contemplating the sudden discovery that his mind had made,
+about the relationship between his having no money for a bed and his
+having met Francis Joseph McPhillip, who was wanted for murder in
+connection with the farm-labourers’ strike at M—— in the previous
+October. A terrific silence reigned within his head.
+
+Now and again he looked around him with a kind of panting noise. He
+snorted and smelled the air and screwed up his eyes. Then he leaned
+over the wall again and rested his chin on his crossed hands. He was
+that way for half an hour. Then at last he drew himself up straight.
+He stretched his arms above his head. He yawned. He stuck his hands in
+his trousers pockets. He stared at the ground. Then with his eyes on
+the ground he walked away at the same slouching pace as before.
+
+He crossed the river and traversed a maze of side streets, with his
+eyes always on the ground, until he reached the corner of a dark side
+street, that had a bright lamp hanging over a doorway, half-way down
+on the right-hand side. That was a police-station. He stared at the
+lamp with his eyes wide open for several moments. Almost a minute.
+Then he said “Huh” out loud. Then he looked around him cautiously on
+all sides.
+
+The street was empty. Rain drizzled slowly. He examined the street,
+the warehouses on his side of the street, the blank wall on the other
+side. Then his eyes came back to the bright lamp that hung above the
+door of the police-station. He sighed deeply and began to walk slowly,
+ever so slowly and ponderously, towards the lamp.
+
+He walked up the steps, steadily, one at a time, making a loud noise.
+He kicked the swing door open with his foot without taking his hands
+out of his pockets. In the hallway, a constable in a black,
+cone-shaped, night helmet stood facing him, pulling on his gloves.
+Gypo halted and stared at the constable.
+
+“I have come to claim the twenty pounds reward offered by the Farmers’
+Union for information concerning Francis Joseph McPhillip,” he said in
+a deep, low voice.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+At thirty-five minutes past seven Francis Joseph McPhillip shot
+himself dead while trying to escape from No. 44 Titt Street, his
+father’s house. The house had been surrounded by Detective-Sergeant
+McCartney and ten men. Hanging by his left hand from the sill of the
+back-bedroom window on the second floor, McPhillip put two bullets
+into McCartney’s left shoulder. While he was trying to fire again, his
+left hand slipped and lost its hold. The pistol muzzle struck the edge
+of the sill. The bullet shot upwards and entered McPhillip’s brain
+through the right temple.
+
+When they picked him out of the orange box in the back garden where he
+fell, he was quite dead.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+At twenty-five minutes past eight Gypo left the police-station by a
+door in the rear of the building. In his pocket he carried twenty
+pounds in Treasury notes, the reward for information concerning
+Francis Joseph McPhillip.
+
+He walked quickly along a narrow passage into a dark lane. The lane
+was empty. So it appeared at first. But as Gypo stood hidden in the
+doorway of an old empty house, piercing the darkness with wild eyes,
+he heard a footstep. The footstep made him start. It was the first
+human footstep he had heard, the first sound of his fellow human
+beings, since he had become an informer and . . . and an outcast.
+
+Immediately he felt that the footstep was menacing, as if he were
+certain that it belonged to somebody that was tracking him. How
+strange! Within the course of ninety minutes the customary sound of a
+human footstep had, by some evil miracle, become menacing. Ninety
+minutes ago, his ears would not have challenged the sound of a human
+footstep, no more than they would have challenged the sound of the
+breath coming normally from his lungs. But now they pricked into
+attention at the trudging shuffle that approached from the left. His
+heart began to pant.
+
+Of course it was nobody of consequence. It was only a ragged old woman
+of ill fame, with a debauched face and melancholy eyes. She paused
+drunkenly in front of him, muttering something unintelligible. Then
+she bared her ragged teeth. She spat and passed on without speaking.
+Was it an omen? Gypo did not notice that it was. He merely listened to
+the sound of her footsteps, splashing carelessly through the pools.
+
+Then he looked ahead of him furtively and moved off with the careful
+listening, stooping movement of a man wandering alone at night in a
+forest gorge where lions are about. He turned a corner and came face
+to face with a blaze of light and a street with shops and crowds of
+people going about. At first he shuddered with fear. Then he swore and
+drew in a deep breath. What had he to fear? He knew the street well.
+Who was going to interfere with him? His giant fists clawed up, like
+talons enraged, and the muscles of his throat and shoulders stiffened.
+He imagined himself throttling these enemies who might be inclined to
+assault him. He felt comforted, reminded by this pressure of his
+muscles, of his enormous strength. He settled his little round hat
+jauntily on the back of his head. He stuck his hands in his trousers
+pockets. He swung his legs and rolled like a sailor out of the lane,
+arrogantly, into the glare of the street.
+
+At the same slow, swinging, rolling gait, he crossed the street
+through the traffic without pausing, without stepping aside, without
+looking to the right or to the left. Motor-cars, carts, bicycles and
+wagons swerved to avoid him. He went through them without looking at
+them, like a great monster walking through a cloud of ants, that are
+carrying on their futile and infinitesimal labours about his feet.
+They turned towards him to curse, but those that saw his face gaped
+and passed into the night with the curse unuttered. His face, with the
+humps on it shining in the glare of the lamps, was like a subtle mask.
+It was so . . . so dead.
+
+He walked straight across the pavement into a public-house. He kicked
+the swing door open with his foot, without taking his hands out of his
+pockets, just as he had entered the police-station. He put a pound
+note on the counter with a slap of his palm and uttered the one word:
+“Pint.” He stared at the counter until the drink was served. He put
+the measure to his head, opened his throat and swallowed the contents
+at one draught. He uttered a deep sigh and handed the empty glass to
+the barman. He nodded. When he received another pint and his change,
+he walked over to the corner and sat down.
+
+Now he definitely set out to form a plan of action. It had been a
+habit with McPhillip and himself. Whenever they had done any “stunt,”
+they immediately went into a public-house, got drinks and set about
+forming plans for an alibi.
+
+“Never bother about yer ‘getaway’ until yer job is done,” used to be a
+motto of McPhillip’s.
+
+Suddenly Gypo realized what a clever fellow McPhillip must really have
+been. He used to make plans so easily. They jumped to his mind one
+after the other, like lightning. Gypo had never given any thought to
+the matter of plans. He often used to say to McPhillip with a queer
+glassy look in his eyes: “Mac, you bite the easy side o’ the cheese. I
+got to do all the rough work an’ you do all the thinkin’. Strikes me
+you get away with it easy, mate.”
+
+Now, for the first time, he realized the difficulty of making a plan
+without McPhillip. When he had to think it out for himself it appeared
+to be devilish work. His brain got all in a tangle and he could make a
+beginning nowhere. He gathered himself together several times, with
+set lips and stiffened back, like a horse stiffening for a great tug
+at an immense weight, but it was no use. He could not overcome the
+weight that seemed to fall on his brain every time his sensibilities
+approached it, probing tentatively for information. Sitting on a deal
+bench at the rear of the bar, with his legs crossed and his pint of
+porter in his right hand, held in front of him, with his elbow resting
+on his knee and the froth of the porter dripping from the glass slowly
+on to the tip of his raised boot, he stared at the ground, in an agony
+of complicated thought. His little tattered brown hat, perched on the
+top of his skull, looked like a magic charm, endowed with reason and
+knowledge, mounting guard over his stupid strength.
+
+He had not even cleared his brain for a beginning with this devilish
+work of making a plan when he was interrupted by the arrival of Katie
+Fox. She had sat down beside him before he knew she was there. He was
+so immersed in his struggles that she nudged him and spoke before he
+was aware of her presence.
+
+“How’s things, Gypo?” she cried in her hard thin voice, as she nudged
+him in the ribs. “Are ye flush enough to give us a wet?”
+
+Gypo jumped to his feet, spilling half his pint. He gazed at her with
+fright in his eyes and his chest heaved. Then he recognized her and
+sat down immediately, flurried and confused by his display of
+excitement.
+
+“Hello, Katie,” he muttered, pretending to be vexed, “ye shouldn’t
+come in that way on a fellah. I look around me an’ there ye are
+proddin’ me in the ribs. Why the divil didn’t ye shout same as ye
+always do?”
+
+She put the backs of her thin, red-veined hands on her hips and stared
+at him in amazement, partly real, partly born of that love of emphatic
+gesture and movement and speech which is a peculiar characteristic of
+the women of the Dublin slums. Katie was a woman of the slums. Her
+father had been an employee of the Corporation and her mother was a
+charwoman. As a girl Katie worked in a biscuit factory. Her own beauty
+of body and the grinding toil in the factory made her discontented.
+She joined the Revolutionary Organization. That was six years ago.
+After that, her first plunge from the straight path of the tremendous
+respectability and conservatism of the slum woman, she was led by
+excess of feeling into one pitfall after another. Finally she passed
+out of the ranks of respectability altogether by being expelled from
+the Revolutionary Organization on a charge of public prostitution. Now
+she had become an abandoned woman, known as such even among the
+prostitutes of the brothel quarter, a drug fiend, a slattern, an
+irresponsible creature. Traces of her young beauty still remained in
+the deep blue eyes, that were melancholy and tired and twitched at the
+edges, in her long lean figure now grown emaciated, in her black hair
+that strayed carelessly about her face from beneath the rim of her
+ragged red hat. But the mouth, that tell-tale register of vice, had
+completely lost the sumptuous but delicate curves of innocent girlhood
+and blossoming maturity. The lips hung down at the sides. They were
+swollen in the middle. Their colour had died out and had been renewed
+with loud vulgarity by cheap paint. The poor tormented soul peered out
+of the young face, old before the years had time to wrinkle it, sad,
+hard and stupefied.
+
+She thrust out her little chin and turned her head sideways, turning
+down the corners of her lips farther at one side of her mouth.
+
+“I thought as much,” she said slowly, contorting her lips and face as
+she spoke. “That’s why I came in unknownst and sat down beside ye. I
+saw ye be chance, me fine buck, as I was talkin’ to Biddy Mac over at
+the corner opposite Kane’s. So I just prowled in to see ye on the
+quiet. But it’s clear as daylight that ye don’t want to see me. Not
+while ye got money to fill yersel’ with porter. It was a different
+story, wasn’t it, this mornin’ when ye begged the price of a cup o’
+tay off me, an’ me that didn’t see the colour of a half-crown for
+three days runnin’. Oh then——”
+
+“Now shut yer gob, will ye,” interrupted Gypo excitedly. “It’s just
+like ye takin’ a man up wrong that way. Sure I didn’t mane anythin’
+like that atall. Only ye just came in on me all of a sudden. What are
+ye havin’?”
+
+Katie looked at him in high dudgeon, still with her chin thrust out,
+her head turned sideways, her lips turned downwards and her hands on
+her hips. She murmured: “Double Gin,” without moving her eyes from
+Gypo’s face. Gypo arose and slouched up to the counter for the drink.
+Her eyes followed him shrewdly and she kept nodding her head slowly at
+his immense back.
+
+Her relationship with Gypo was of that irregular kind which is hard to
+describe by means of one word. She was undoubtedly not his wife and in
+the same manner she could not be called his mistress. But their
+relationship partook both of the nature of lawful marriage and of the
+concubinage that is sanctified by natural love. Katie loved Gypo
+because he was strong, big, silent, perhaps also because he was stupid
+and her ready slum “smartness” could always outwit his lumbering
+brain. Whenever Gypo had any money he spent it with her. Sometimes
+when he was without any money, she brought him home with her and
+provided him with his breakfast next morning. On the whole they were
+good friends. During the past six months after Gypo had been expelled
+from the Revolutionary Organization and left without friends or money
+or employment, Katie had stood between him and death from exposure or
+starvation. She loved him in her own amazing way. The last remains of
+her womanhood loved him as she might have loved a mate. But those
+shreds of love lived charily among the rank weeds of vice that
+flourished around them. It was only at times that they peeped out and
+covered the desert waste of her soul with the soft warmth and
+brilliance of their light. Each kindly act of pity for the lumbering
+giant was counteracted by a score of other acts that were vicious and
+cruel. While Gypo, with the nonchalance of the healthy strong man,
+took her for granted as if she were a natural contrivance of life,
+like fresh air or food. He would only notice her absence when she was
+needed.
+
+He brought the gin and handed it to her. She took it in silence. She
+sipped it slowly, holding it within an inch of her lips, staring at
+the ground as she drank, shivering now and again, as if the drink were
+ice cold. Gypo watched her suspiciously out of the corner of his eyes.
+
+“What brought ye around here anyway?” he said at last.
+
+He was extremely irritated that she should have come in on him, just
+at that moment, when he was trying to make a plan, when he had the
+money of his betrayal hot on his person, without being yet embalmed by
+a plausible excuse for its presence. He was irritated, but in a
+confused and ignorant way. He had not reasoned out a plausible excuse,
+even for his irritation.
+
+Katie held her empty glass upside down in her hand and looked at him,
+with her blue eyes almost shut.
+
+“Why, what’s the matter with ye, kiddo?” she asked arrogantly,
+encouraged by the gin. “Why shouldn’t I knock around here if I want
+to. I’m not employed by a charitable institution at so much an hour to
+keep out o’ yer honour’s way, ha, ha, when it’s yer lordship’s
+pleasure to come into this pub. There’s no law agin me comin’ around
+this part o’ the city at this hour, is there?” She worked herself into
+a fit of anger gradually as she spoke. She had an idea that Gypo was
+concealing something important from her and that her arrival at that
+moment gave her some power over him. That peculiar intuition of the
+slum woman could pierce the surface of Gypo’s embarrassment, but
+without being able to probe into the real nature of it. She pushed
+back her coat with her left hand and put the back of her hand against
+her reddish frayed blouse below the heart. How slight her breasts
+were!
+
+“Now Katie—” began Gypo.
+
+But she interrupted him immediately. She had been only waiting for him
+to begin to speak in order to interrupt him. She was quite happy when
+given the opportunity of a “barge” of this description.
+
+“Go on with ye,” she cried, “pug nose! I know ye, Ya. You’re bum all
+right. Yer all right as long as ye get nothin’. But as soon as ye can
+smell yersel’ after a good meal an’ there a gingle in yer rags, ye
+stick yer nose into the air an’ ye know nobody. D’ye know what I’m
+goin’ to tell ye, Gypo? D’ye know what I’m goin’ to tell ye? Yer a
+mane, lyin’, deceitful twister an’ I got yer measure from now on.
+Don’t look for nothin’ from me from now on, my fine bucko. No then;
+’twill be little use for ye.”
+
+Gypo became nervous and shifted his huge body. He wanted to let his
+left hand fly out and hit her in the jaw. One slight blow would make
+her senseless. But he had never struck a woman, owing to some obscure
+prejudice or other. Still, he was terribly tired of her. Now that he
+had this money on his person, without as yet having decided what to do
+with it, he wanted to be free from her.
+
+“You shut up,” he cried angrily, “or I’ll fix ye. Haven’t I given ye a
+drink?” Then he added half-heartedly: “D’ye want another drink?”
+
+Katie was still staring at him. Suddenly a change came over her.
+Something suggested itself to her peculiar reason and she changed her
+attitude.
+
+“Don’t mind what I said now, Gypo,” she continued in a low mournful
+voice, looking at the ground with hanging lower lip, like a person
+overwhelmed and utterly defeated by some persistent calamity. “God
+Almighty, the world is so hard that a person loses her mind
+altogether. Misery, misery, misery an’ nothin’ but misery. You’re as
+bad off as mesel’, Gypo, so ye know what I mane. No man has pity on
+us. Every hand is agin us because we have got nothin’. Why is that,
+will ye tell me, Gypo? Is God Himself agin us too? Ha, ha, o’ course
+we were both of us Communists and members o’ the Revolutionary
+Organization, so we know there’s no God. But supposin’ there was a
+God, what the hell is He doin’——”
+
+“Katie,” cried Gypo angrily, “none o’ that talk. Lave God alone.”
+
+“God forgive me, yer right,” cried Katie, beginning to sob. But she
+pulled herself together suddenly with surprising speed and turned to
+Gypo almost sharply. Her eyes narrowed slightly and a quaint weird
+smile lit up her face. There was a trace of beauty in her face under
+the influence of the smile, a trace of beauty and merriment. “Tell us
+where ye got all the money, Gypo. Ye had none this mornin’.”
+
+Gypo started in spite of himself and glanced at her in terror. He
+struggled violently, trying to formulate an excuse for his sudden
+wealth. He fumed within himself for not having made a plan.
+Unconsciously he cursed McPhillip, whom he had sent to his death, for
+not having made a plan. He looked at Katie with glaring eyes and open
+lips. Then he bent towards her, tried to speak and said nothing. But
+she misunderstood him.
+
+“Ya,” she said, “I knew ye were yellow. Have ye robbed a church or
+what, an’ are ye afraid of bein’ turned into a goat be the priests?”
+
+“Shut up,” he hissed suddenly, gripping at the word “robbery” and
+hooking a plan on to it. It was a customary word, a friendly thing
+that he recognized, with which he felt at home. He bent down, with
+quivering face, eager to hurl out the words of his plan before he
+could forget them again. “It wasn’t a church. It was a sailor off an
+American ship. I went through him at the back o’ Cassidy’s pub in
+Jerome Street. But if ye say a word ye know what yer goin’ to get.”
+
+“Who? Me?” Katie laughed out loud and looked at him with emphatic
+scorn over her shoulder. “What d’ye take me for? An informer or what?”
+
+“Who’s an informer?” cried Gypo, gripping her right knee with his left
+hand. The huge hand closed about the thin frail knee and immediately
+the whole leg went rigid. Katie’s whole body shrivelled at the mere
+touch of the vast strength.
+
+There was silence for a second. Gypo stared at Katie with a look of
+ignorant fear on his face. The word had terrified and infuriated him.
+It was the first time he had heard it uttered in the new sense that it
+now held for him. Katie, hypnotized by the face, panted and looked
+back at him.
+
+“What are ye talkin’ about informin’ for?” panted Gypo again,
+tightening his grip on her knee. He had not meant to hurt. He merely
+wanted to give emphasis to his words.
+
+“Lemme go,” screamed Katie, unable to endure the pain any longer and
+terrified by the look in Gypo’s face and by his strange behaviour.
+
+Gypo let go immediately. The barman came striding over, wiping his
+hands in his apron. He pointed toward the door. Gypo got to his feet
+and stared at the barman, glad to have a man in front of him, against
+whom he could vent his ignorant rage. He lowered his head and he was
+about to rush forward when Katie hung on to him and cried out.
+
+“Come on, Gypo,” she cried rapidly, “let’s get out of here. Let him
+alone, Barney. He’s got a few pints on him. He didn’t mane any harm.
+Come on, kid.”
+
+Gypo allowed himself to be dragged out backwards by the right hand
+into the street. They stood together on the kerbstone, with Katie’s
+arm entwined in his.
+
+“Come on up to Biddy Burke’s place,” she whispered in a friendly tone.
+“Come on up.”
+
+In front stretched a main road, brilliantly lighted and thronged with
+people. The light, the people, the suggestion of gaiety and of freedom
+attracted Gypo. To the rear stretched a dark, evil-smelling lane. It
+repelled him. There was where Katie wanted to bring him, down towards
+the slum district and the brothel quarter. Down there were his own
+haunts, people who knew him. He feared the darkness, the lurking
+shadows, the suggestion of men hiding in alleyways to attack him. Out
+there in front he could wander off, among strange people who did not
+care a straw about informers.
+
+“Come on Gyp, down to Biddy’s and buy us a sniff,” murmured Katie
+entreatingly, in a soft voice. “Yer flush, aren’t ye? I know well them
+American sailors carry a quare wad around with ’em. Let’s walk along.
+I’m perished with the cold.”
+
+“No,” muttered Gypo in a surly voice. “I’m goin’ down to the House to
+book a bed for the night.”
+
+He now remembered with pleasure that the reason for his going to the
+police-station was the fact that he wanted money for a bed. So why not
+go and buy a bed? It was a good excuse to get rid of her.
+
+“What are ye talkin’ about a bed for?” cried Katie angrily, clutching
+at his arm. Then her voice softened again. There was an eager glitter
+in her eyes. “Sure it’s not thinkin’ about a bed ye are when ye got
+money in yer pocket. Haven’t I got a bed anyway, an’ if it’s not good
+enough for ye, sure we can get a bed at Biddy’s, seein’ ye have money
+in yer pocket.”
+
+“I don’t want yer bed,” snarled Gypo, “an’ I’m not goin’ near Biddy
+Burke’s. I been robbed by the thievin’ old robber often enough.”
+
+“Ye don’t want me bed, don’t ye?” cried Katie, losing her temper again
+completely. “Ye were glad enough to have it last week when I brought
+ye in outa the rain like a drownded rat. Wha’?”
+
+“Now I’ll give ye nothin’ for yer imperence,” grumbled Gypo. “Yer too
+ignorant. That’s what ye are.”
+
+She moved up under his chin and held her two clenched fists to his
+jaws. They looked white and tiny against the size of his face.
+
+“All right,” she hissed, “you watch out for yersel’, Gypo Nolan.”
+
+She turned on her heel and went off at a fierce walk to the left,
+muttering curses as she disappeared rapidly into the darkness. Gypo
+stared after her, listening. He strained his neck in an effort to
+catch a final mumble of sharp words that floated up to him through the
+dark lane, as her obscure figure drifted around a corner. Then he
+shrugged his shoulders with a gasp as if he had just watched a
+valuable possession suddenly drop over a cliff. With his hands in his
+trousers pockets he stared at the ground.
+
+“Look here, Katie,” he called out suddenly, reaching out his right
+hand impotently towards the corner off the lane, around which she had
+swept. Then he put his hand back into his pocket and gripped the tight
+wad of Treasury notes. He wanted now to give her some money. She had
+been good to him. He began to walk up the lane slowly. There was no
+need to hurry. He knew where to find her. He must not let her go like
+that.
+
+But he had not gone ten yards before he halted again. He turned about
+and walked back quickly into the main road. He had suddenly remembered
+a terrifying thing.
+
+Supposing somebody were to come into Biddy Burke’s and say that Frank
+McPhillip had been killed owing to information being given to the
+police? They were sure to say that. They would see him there with
+money in his pocket. They would suspect. . . .
+
+He turned to the right, past the corner of the main road. He went
+twenty yards down the street and then brought his two feet together
+like a soldier coming to a halt on parade. He wheeled inwards, still
+in the same mechanical manner, towards a shop window. He stood at
+ease, clasping his hands behind his back in military manner. Somehow,
+it gave peace to his distracted thoughts, as if he had suddenly given
+over the responsibility of his thoughts and actions to an imaginary
+superior officer.
+
+Into his resting mind pleasant memories came, distant pleasant
+memories like day-dreams on a summer day, dreamt on the banks of a
+rock-strewn river, among the flowering heather. They were memories of
+his youth. They came to him in a strange bewildered manner, as if
+afraid of the dark, ferocious mind into which they came. Gypo stared
+at them fiercely, with bulging lips, as if they were enemies taunting
+him. Then gradually he softened towards them. Then a mad longing
+seized him for the protection of the environment of his youth, the
+country-side of a Tipperary village, the little farm, the big
+red-faced healthy peasant who was his father, his long-faced
+kind-hearted mother, who hoped that he would become a priest.
+
+He wrinkled up his face and looked at his youth intently. He stiffened
+himself, as if he were about to hurl himself by sheer force back
+through the intervening years, of sin and sorrow and misery, to the
+peace and gentleness and monotony of life, in that little village at
+the foot of the Galtees.
+
+Various, intimate, foolish, little recollections crowded into his
+mind. He remembered goats, asses’ foals, rocks in a mountain torrent,
+a saying of the village smith, a glance from a girl, his first drink
+of wine stolen in the sacristy of the parish church while he was
+serving Mass. Thousands of memories came and went rapidly. They passed
+like soldiers before a saluting-point, some gay, some sad, some dim,
+some distinct and almost articulate as if they had happened a moment
+ago.
+
+Suddenly he felt a wet daub coming down each cheek. He started. He was
+shedding tears. The horror of the act made him stare wild eyed. He
+swore aloud. He bared his teeth of their covering of thick lips and
+ground them. His youth went out like a candle that is quenched by a
+squall in a long passage. The grinning spectre of the present became
+real once more. He shut his mouth. He sighed very deeply. Putting his
+hands in his pockets again, he walked off at his habitual slouch, with
+his head hanging slightly forward, hung on the pivot of his neck like
+a punchball.
+
+“I must make a plan,” he said to himself once more.
+
+Somehow he was convinced that the Revolutionary Organization already
+suspected him of having given information concerning McPhillip. He
+felt that he was being sought for already. So he must make a plan. He
+must have a plausible excuse.
+
+“If ye got a good aliby,” McPhillip used to say, “the divil himself
+couldn’t fasten anythin’ on ye.”
+
+But how was he going to get an alibi for himself? He walked the whole
+length of the road three times irresolutely, with his eyes fixed on
+the ground. He was unable to think of anything. His mind kept
+branching off into the contemplation of silly things that had nothing
+at all to do with the question, the favourite for the Grand National
+and whether Johnny Grimes, the comedian, had drowned himself in the
+Canal or whether he had been murdered and then thrown in; the two main
+questions that were agitating the Dublin slums just then.
+
+At one moment he decided to go to the Dunboy Lodging House, pay for a
+bed and go to sleep. But immediately he was terrified at this
+suggestion. They might know already that he had given information.
+Then maybe, while he was asleep, somebody would be sent into his
+little cell with a loaded stick to murder him in his sleep. Or they
+might give him “the bum’s rush,” breaking his neck silently like a
+rabbit’s neck. He pictured the little narrow wooden cells in the
+lodging house, the silence of the night, broken only by the dismal
+sound of snoring on all sides, an indiscriminate number of unknown
+people snoring loudly, dreaming, grumbling, snoring and sleeping in
+all directions, while _“they”_ approached silently to murder him.
+
+He shuddered. Perspiration stood out on his forehead. Eagerly, with
+relief, he decided to keep in the open, where he could use his hands
+and his strength. If he were going to be murdered he would be murdered
+with his hands gripping a dead throat.
+
+Then at last he stood stock-still and thumped himself in the chest.
+
+“Well, I’m damned!” he cried. “Amn’t I an awful fool? Why didn’t I
+think of it before? They’ll be wonderin’ why I’m not there already.
+Everybody in the town must ’a heard of it be now, an’ me that was his
+pal an’ I not there to say a word to his mother. They’ll surely
+suspect something if I don’t go at once.”
+
+Narrowing his eyes, he set out at a smart pace in the direction of
+McPhillip’s home in Titt Street. He took his hands out of his pockets
+and swung them by his sides after the manner of a policeman. He threw
+his head back and towered like a giant over those whom he passed.
+
+He passed them, almost over them, like a being utterly remote, a
+unique creation.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+Titt Street was in turmoil like an ant-hill that has been rooted up by
+the ponderous hoof of a cow. Under the scattered street lamps, between
+the parallel rows of two-storied, red-brick houses, groups of
+wild-eyed men were talking. The pale light of the lamps showed the
+drizzling rain falling like steam on their rough, dirty clothes, on
+their thick-veined necks, on their excited faces, on their gnarled
+hands that were raised in gesticulation. Their voices filled the
+hollow darkness of the street with a hushed murmur, that rose and fell
+turbulently, like the chattering of a torrent coming through rocks.
+Their voices were nervous, as if they awaited a storm at sea.
+
+Old women with shawls over their heads flitted about like shadows.
+They darted from doorway to doorway, talking, making threatening
+gestures at something remote, crossing themselves with their haggard
+faces turned upwards to the sky. Young women walked arm-in-arm,
+slowly, up and down the street. They looked at No. 44 as they passed
+it, in silence, with awe in their open, red lips.
+
+No. 44 was the centre of interest. The horror that had come to it had
+aroused the whole street. It had aroused the whole quarter. Three
+streets away, bar attendants stood gaping behind their counters, while
+some man, with an excited red face and a big mouth, recounted the
+manner of Frank McPhillip’s death, with oaths and frenzied
+gesticulations. Everywhere, in the streets, in the public-houses, in
+the tenement kitchens, where old red-nosed men craned forward their
+shrivelled necks to hear the dreadful news, one word was whispered
+with fear and hatred.
+
+It was the word “Informer.”
+
+Gypo heard that word as he reached the junction of Titt Street and
+Bryan Road—a long wide road, lined with little shops, the sidewalks
+strewn with papers, little heaps of dirt in the gutters, two tram-car
+lines rusted by the drizzling rain, groups of loafers at every
+lamp-post, at the public-house doors and on the Canal Bridge, where
+the road disappeared abruptly over the horizon, as if it had fallen
+over a precipice into space. He was passing Ryan’s public-house that
+stood at the corner, half in Titt Street, half in Bryan Road. The word
+came to him through the open door of the public bar. He had slowed
+down his pace on reaching the neighbourhood and when he heard the word
+uttered, he brought his left leg up to the right and instead of
+thrusting it forward for another pace, he dropped it heavily but
+noiselessly to the wet pavement of red and white glazed brick
+diamonds, with which the front of the public-house was decorated.
+
+A squall of wind came around the corner just then and buffeted him
+about the body. He opened his mouth and nostrils. He distended his
+eyes. He thrust forward his head and listened.
+
+“There must ’a been information gev, ’cos how else could they—” a tall
+lean man was saying, as he stood in the middle of the sawdust-covered
+floor, holding a pint of black frothing porter in his right hand.
+
+Then a burly carter, with a grey sack around his shoulders like a
+cape, jostled the man who was speaking, in an awkward attempt to cross
+the floor through the crowd. But the man had said enough. Gypo knew
+that they were talking about the death of Francis Joseph McPhillip and
+that they suspected that information had been given.
+
+Again the idea came into his head that he must form a plan without a
+moment’s delay. But the inside of his head was perfectly empty, with
+his forehead pressing against it, hot and congested, as if he had been
+struck a violent blow with a flat stick. The idea floundered about in
+his head, repeating itself aimlessly, like a child calling for help in
+an empty house. “No,” he muttered to himself, as he gripped his clasp
+knife fiercely in his trousers pocket, “I can’t make out anythin’
+standin’ here in the rain in front of a pub. Better go ahead.”
+
+He hurled himself around the corner against the squall into Titt
+Street with almost drunken violence. Then he realized with terror the
+fate that menaced him if . . . He saw the groups under the lamp-posts.
+He saw the flitting women. He saw the youths, hushed, strained,
+expectant. He heard the rumble of human sound. The dark, sombre, mean
+street that had been familiar to him until now, suddenly appeared
+strange, as if he had never seen it before, as if it had suddenly
+become inhabited by dread monsters that were intent on devouring him.
+It appeared to him rather, that he had wandered, through a foolish
+error of judgment, into a strange and hostile foreign country where he
+did not know the language.
+
+He glared about him aggressively, as he walked up the street. He
+planted his feet on the ground firmly, walking with his legs wide
+apart, with his shoulders squared, with his head thrust forward into
+the wind like the jib boom of a ship.
+
+As he was passing an open doorway somebody cried “hist.” He halted
+like a challenged sentry. He wheeled savagely towards the doorway and
+called out.
+
+“Who are cryin’ hist after?”
+
+“It’s only me,” chirped an old lady in a clean white apron, a woman he
+knew well. “I thought ye were Jim Delaney, the coalheaver. I got to
+whisper on account o’ me throat. I got a cold a fortnight ago,
+scrubbin’ floors out at Clontarf, an’ it’s getting worse instead of
+better. The doctor——”
+
+But Gypo glanced angrily at her bandaged throat and her dim blue eyes
+and passed on with a grunt without listening to her further. He
+arrived at No. 44 and entered through the open door without knocking.
+
+No. 44 was the most respectable house in the street. Its red-brick
+front was cleaner than the other fronts. Its parlour window was
+unbroken and was decorated with clean curtains of Nottingham lace. Its
+door was freshly painted black. Its owner Jack McPhillip, the
+bricklayer, had already begun the ascent from the working class to the
+middle class. He was a Socialist and chairman of his branch of the
+trade union, but a thoroughly respectable, conservative Socialist,
+utterly fanatical in his hatred of the status of a working man. The
+whole house was in keeping with his views on life. The door opened on
+a little narrow hall, with the stair-way rising midway in it. The
+stair-way was spotlessly clean, with brightly polished brass rods
+holding down the well-washed linoleum carpet that struggled upwards
+rigidly to the top of it. From the door, in daytime, the backyard
+could be seen. In the backyard there were outhouses and stables, for
+Jack McPhillip kept a yellow she-goat, three pigs, a flock of white
+hens and a little pony and trap, in which he was in the habit of
+driving out into the country on Sundays, in summer, with his wife, to
+visit his wife’s relatives at Talmuc. To the right of the hall there
+were two doors. The first door opened into the parlour. In the parlour
+there was a piano, eight chairs of all sizes and sorts, innumerable
+photographs, “ornaments,” and absolutely no room for anybody to move
+about without touching something or other. The second door opened into
+the kitchen, a large clean room with a cement floor, an open grate and
+a narrow bed in the corner farthest from the door. The bed belonged to
+old Ned Lawless, the epileptic relative of Mrs. McPhillip. He lived in
+the house and received his meals and half a crown per week, in
+exchange for his labours in looking after the backyard. He was never
+clean, the only dirty thing in the house. On the second floor there
+were three rooms. One was used by the old couple. The second by the
+only daughter Mary, a girl of twenty-one who worked in the city as a
+clerk, in the offices of Gogarty and Hogan, solicitors and
+commissioners for oaths. The third room, opening on the backyard, had
+been closed for six months. It had been Francis’s bedroom. That
+evening he had just entered it to go to bed when the police arrived.
+
+When Gypo entered, the house was crowded with neighbours who had come
+in to sympathize. Some were even standing in the hallway. Gypo walked
+through the hallway and pushed his way into the kitchen. Nobody
+noticed him. He sat down on the floor to the left of the door, with
+his back to the wall and his right hand grasping his left wrist in
+front of his drawn-up knees. He sat in silence for almost a minute
+waiting for an opportunity to speak to Mrs. McPhillip. He could see
+her through the people in the room, sitting on a chair to the right of
+the fire. She had black wooden rosary beads wound round and round her
+fingers. There were tears in her pale blue eyes and streaming down her
+great white fat cheeks. Her corpulent body flowed over the chair on
+all sides like a load of hay on a cart. Her long check apron hid her
+feet. She was looking dimly at the fire, murmuring prayers silently
+with her lips. She nodded her head now and again in answer to
+something that was said to her.
+
+She held Gypo’s attention like a powerful magnet. Even when somebody
+came between his eyes and her body, he stared through the intervening
+body as if it were transparent. His eyes were centred on her forehead
+and on her grey-white hair, that had a yellowish sheen at the top of
+the skull where the parting was. He was thinking how good she had been
+to him. She had often fed him. More precious still, she always had a
+word of sympathy for him, a kind look, a tender, soft, smooth touch of
+the hand on his shoulder! These were the things his strange soul
+remembered and treasured. There were no others who were soft and
+gentle to him like she was. Often when he and Francis came into the
+house at dawn, after having done some revolutionary “stunt,” she used
+to get up, in her bare fat feet, with a skirt drawn over her
+night-dress. She used to move about silently with quivering lips,
+cooking breakfast. It was a huge meal from her hands, an
+indiscriminate lavish Irish meal, sausages, eggs, bacon, all together
+on one plate.
+
+And she would often press half a crown into Gypo’s hand when nobody
+was looking, whispering: “May the Virgin protect ye an’ won’t ye look
+after Frankie an’ see that he comes to no harm.”
+
+“She is a good woman,” thought Gypo, impersonally, looking at her.
+
+Then the kitchen emptied suddenly in the rear of a fat short man with
+a pompous appearance, who wore a dark raincoat and a black bowler hat.
+Every one made way for him going out the door and there were whispers.
+Some scowled at him angrily, but it was obvious that everybody had a
+great respect for him and envied him, even those that scowled at him.
+He was an important Labour politician, the parliamentary
+representative of the constituency that comprised Titt Street and the
+surrounding slums. This important politician had been a bricklayer
+with Jack McPhillip in his youth and Jack McPhillip was still his main
+supporter.
+
+When the politician had disappeared there were only five people left
+in the room, other than Jack McPhillip and his wife. Three men in the
+corner by the window, to the left of Gypo, had their heads close
+together, whispering with that sudden intimacy that is born of the
+presence of a calamity, or of something that has a common interest.
+Gypo knew two of them. Two of them were members of the Revolutionary
+Organization.
+
+“That skunk Bartly Mulholland is here,” muttered Gypo to himself, “an’
+that’s Tommy Connor with him. Mulholland is lookin’ for Frankie
+McPhillip’s job on the Intelligence Department, I believe; an’ I
+suppose that big stiff Connor is trainin’ to be his butty. Huh.”
+
+Jack McPhillip sat on the narrow bed in the other corner, almost
+opposite Gypo. He was talking to two women, who had chairs close to
+the bed. They had pushed in to talk to McPhillip as soon as the
+politician had left. They were nodding their heads and fidgeting, with
+that amazing prodigality of emotion, which women of the very lowest
+rung of the middle class ladder display, when in the presence of
+members of the working class who are still _in puris naturalibus_. One
+was the wife of the Titt Street “small grocer.” The other was the wife
+of John Kennedy the lorry driver, who had just set up in business “for
+himself.”
+
+Jack McPhillip sat on the bed, with his right shoulder leaning against
+the pillow. One foot was almost on the floor. The other foot was on
+the bed. He held his right hand, palm outwards, in front of his face,
+as if he were trying to drive away some imaginary idea, as he talked.
+
+“There ye are now,” he was saying; “see what that man has done for
+himsel’ in life. That’s what every man should aim at doin’, instead of
+jig actin’ and endin’ up by bringin’ disgrace on his class an’ on his
+family. Johnny Daly is a member o’ Parliament this day because he
+spent any money and time he had to spare on his education. He looked
+after his business and he did his best to educate and better the
+condition of his fellow-men. That’s what every man should do. But my
+son . . . I put him into a good job as an insurance agent an’ if he
+had minded himself he’d be well on his way now towards a respectable
+position in life for himself, but instead o’ that——”
+
+Suddenly there was an amazing interruption that caused everybody to
+start. Gypo had spoken in a deep thunderous voice that filled the
+whole house.
+
+“I’m sorry for yer trouble, Mrs. McPhillip,” he cried.
+
+The sentence re-echoed in the silence that followed it. It had been
+uttered in a shout. Gypo’s voice had suddenly broken loose from his
+lungs into a spontaneous expression of the emotion that shook him into
+a passion of feeling, looking at Mrs. McPhillip. He felt suddenly that
+he must express that feeling forcibly. Not by a whisper, or a plain
+restrained statement, but by a savage shout that would brook no
+contradiction. The shout wandered about in the room long after its
+sound had vanished. Nobody spoke. Its force was too tremendous.
+Everybody, for some amazing reason or other, sniffed at the smell of
+fried sausages that now permeated the atmosphere of the kitchen. The
+smell came from the pan still left on the fireplace, containing the
+sausages that had been cooking for Francis Joseph McPhillip’s supper
+when the police came. He had been so tired that he told his mother to
+bring his supper to him in bed. So they still remained there, on the
+side of the fireplace, forgotten.
+
+Then the initial amazement wore off and everybody looked at Gypo. They
+saw him sitting on the floor, doubled up, bulky in his blue dungarees
+that clung about his thighs like a swimming suit, with his little
+round hat perched on his massive head, still staring at Mrs.
+McPhillip’s face as if drawn by a magnet, unconscious of the amazement
+he had caused by his shout.
+
+And alone of all the people in the room, Mrs. McPhillip was not
+amazed. She had not started. She had not moved her eyes. Her lips
+still moved in prayer. Her mind was drawn by another magnet to the
+contemplation of something utterly remote from the people in that
+room, utterly remote from life, to the contemplation of something that
+had its roots in the mystic boundaries of eternity.
+
+Then Jack McPhillip jumped to a sitting posture on the bed. He grabbed
+at the old tweed cap that had fallen off his grizzled grey head.
+
+“Oh, it’s you that’s in it, is it?” he cried. “Ye son o’ damnation!”
+
+He glared at Gypo so ferociously that his face began to twitch. His
+face was so burned by the sun that it was almost black at a distance.
+At close quarters it looked a reddish brown. He had a glass eye. The
+other eye looked straight across the glass one, as if guarding it. He
+had to look away from a man in order to see him. This distortion in
+his vision had always filled his wife with terror, so that now she
+trembled whenever he looked at her. It was so uncanny, his looking at
+space like that. His body was short and slight. He was fifty years
+old.
+
+He jumped off the bed and stood on the floor in his grey socks, his
+blue waistcoat unbuttoned, the little white patch of linen on the
+abdomen of his grey flannel shirt puffing in and out with his heavy
+breathing, his throat contorting, his hands gripping and ungripping
+restlessly.
+
+Mrs. McPhillip had awakened from her reverie as soon as her husband
+spoke. She had started up and gripped her breast over her heart with a
+dumb exclamation. Then she rubbed her two eyes hurriedly and looked at
+him. As soon as she saw him, her eyes grew dim again and her body
+subsided into the chair from which it had risen slightly.
+
+“Jack,” she cried in an agonized voice, “Jack! Jack, leave him alone.
+He was Frankie’s friend. He was a friend of me dead boy’s. Let him
+alone. What’s done is done.”
+
+“Be damned to that for a story,” cried Jack. His voice was weak and
+jerky, just like the voice of his dead son. “A friend d’ye call him?
+What kind of friend d’ye call that waster that never did a day’s work
+in his life? That ex-policeman! He was even driven outa the police.
+That’s fine company for yer son, Maggie. It’s the likes o’ him that’s
+brought Frankie to his death an’ destruction. Them an’ their
+revolutions. It’s in Russia they should be where they could act the
+cannibal as much as they like, instead of leadin’ good honest Irishmen
+astray. Why don’t they get out of here and go back to England where
+they came from, with their rotten gold, gev to them be the Orangemen
+to turn Ireland into an uproar, so that the Freemasons could step in
+again and capture it. Ah-h-h-h, I’d like to get me fingers on yer
+throat, ye——”
+
+He was rushing across the floor at Gypo, but the three men had jumped
+up and caught him. They held him back. Gypo stared at him, as if in
+perplexity, without moving. But the muscles of his shoulders
+stiffened, almost unconsciously. His eyes wandered slowly from the
+fuming husband to the sobbing wife, who had again turned to the fire.
+
+Then the people from the parlour rushed into the kitchen, attracted by
+the shouting. They were headed by Mary McPhillip, the daughter of the
+house. She was a handsome young woman, with a full figure, plump, with
+red cheeks, a firm jaw, auburn hair cropped in the current fashion,
+blue eyes that had a “sensible” look in them and a rather large mouth
+that was opened wide by her excitement. Every bit of her except her
+mouth belonged to an average Irishwoman of the middle class. The mouth
+was a product of the slums. Its size and its propensity for disclosing
+the state of the mind by exaggerated movement, which is the hallmark
+of the slum girl, belied the neat elegance of the rest of the body and
+of all the clothes. She was still dressed just as she had arrived from
+the office, in a smart navy-blue costume which she had made herself.
+The skirt was rather short, in the current fashion, and she stood with
+her feet fairly wide apart, in the arrogant posture of a woman of good
+family. Her well-shaped calves were covered with thin black silk
+stockings. But she had her hands on her hips, unconsciously, as she
+stood in front of the indiscriminate crowd that had followed her in
+from the parlour, to find out what had caused the disturbance in the
+kitchen.
+
+“What’s the row about, father?” she said.
+
+The accent was good, but a little too good. It was too refined. The
+pronunciation of the words was too correct. It had not that careless
+certainty of the born lady. She spoke in an angry tenor voice, in the
+rich soft tones of the Midlands, her mother’s birthplace. Her voice
+had the softness of butter, that voice which patriotic Irishmen always
+associate with kindness and unassailable innocence and virtue, but
+which is really the natural mask of a stern, resolute character.
+
+“Aren’t we bad enough,” she continued, “without your acting like a
+drunken tramp? Shut up and don’t disgrace yourself.” She stamped her
+right foot and cried again: “Shut up.”
+
+The father relaxed immediately. He began to tremble slightly. He was
+very much afraid of his daughter. In spite of the power of
+vituperation which he undoubtedly possessed, he had been afraid of
+both his children. When Francis had become discontented and joined the
+Revolutionary Organization, the father had poured out threats and
+abuse for hours, almost every night, for the edification of his wife,
+but when the son came in he said nothing. He was a weak, nervous
+character, slightly hysterical, capable of committing any act on the
+spur of the moment, but incapable of pursuing a logical course of
+action resolutely. But his children were resolute. The son was
+resolute in his hatred of existing conditions of society. He was a
+resolute, determined revolutionary, with his father’s energy. The
+daughter was resolute in her determination to get out of the slums.
+
+The father slipped out of the hands of the men that were holding him
+and moved backwards until he reached the bed. He sat down on it
+without looking at it. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve although
+it was perfectly dry. But it had a prickly feeling in it, as if scores
+of needles had thrust themselves out from his brain through it. He
+always felt like that when he got an attack of nerves, especially
+since his son became a revolutionary, and it became known that his
+activities were being watched at police headquarters.
+
+He looked at his daughter, at first in a cowed fashion. He was afraid
+of her, because she had become what he had urged her from her infancy
+to become, “a lady.” He was afraid of her because she was so well
+educated, because she had such “swell” friends, because she dressed so
+well, because she washed herself several times a day, because she
+spoke properly. But then he became irritated with all this and
+remembered that he himself was a Socialist, the chairman of his branch
+of the trade union, a political leader in the district, that all men
+were free and equal and . . . all the pet phrases with which
+respectable Socialists delude themselves into the belief that they are
+philosophers and men of principle. He spoke with a ring of indignation
+and of warning in his voice.
+
+“Am I to be called a tramp by me own daughter in me own house,” he
+cried, “when I tell this ruffian his true character? Yes, an’ every
+other ruffian that’s the curse o’ the workin’-class movement with
+their talk of violence an’ murder an’ revolution. All me life I have
+stood straight for the cause of me fellow-workers. I was one o’ the
+first men to stand up for Connolly an’ the cause o’ Socialism, but I
+always said that the greatest enemies o’ the workin’ class were those
+o’ their own kind that advocated violence. I . . .”
+
+“I told you to shut up,” said Mary in a calm, low voice, as she walked
+over to the bed, with her hands still on her hips. “It’s just like
+you,” she almost hissed, putting her doubled fists into the little
+pockets of her jacket. “It’s just like you to go back on your own
+son.”
+
+She did not know why she was saying this, but she felt some force
+driving her on in opposition to her father, in defence of her dead
+brother. Perhaps it was the audience she had behind her. Because,
+strangely enough, she herself hated Frankie for belonging to the
+Revolutionary Organization, since she got a position two years before
+as clerk in the offices of Gogarty and Hogan. Before that she had been
+a revolutionary herself, but not a member of any organization. She
+used to attend meetings and cheer and get into arguments with
+irritated old gentlemen, etc. But during the past two years her
+outlook on life had undergone a subtle change, gradual but definite.
+At first she began to get “disillusioned,” as she used to tell
+Francis, with the blasé air of a young girl of nineteen. Then she used
+to lecture him on the desirability of keeping better company. This was
+at the time when she made the acquaintance of Joseph Augustine Short,
+a young gentleman who was serving his apprenticeship with Gogarty and
+Hogan and wore plus fours and left Harcourt Street Station every
+Sunday morning, to play golf down the country somewhere. Finally, she
+became opposed violently “to the whole theory of revolution,” as being
+degenerating and “subversive of all moral ideas.” She became religious
+and got the idea into her head that she could convert Commandant Dan
+Gallagher, the leader of the revolutionary movement. All this later
+development had been quite recent, however, and had not matured fully
+in her character. It was yet merely plastic. It had not become a fixed
+habit of thought, surrounded by deep and bitter prejudices, that form
+themselves into “firm convictions.”
+
+For that reason she had responded suddenly to that strange exaltation,
+born of hatred for the law, which is traditional and hereditary in the
+slums. The one glorious romance of the slums is the feeling of intense
+hatred against the oppressive hand of the law, which sometimes
+stretches out to strike some one, during a street row, during an
+industrial dispute, during a Nationalist uprising. It is a clarion
+call to all the spiritual emotion that finds no other means of
+expression in that sordid environment, neither in art, nor in
+industry, nor in commercial undertakings, nor in the more reasonable
+searchings for a religious understanding of the universal creation.
+
+“I stand by what Frankie has done,” she cried, turning to the people.
+“I don’t agree with him in politics, but every man has a right to his
+opinions and every man should fight for his rights according to . . .”
+she got confused and stammered a little. Then she raised her hand
+suddenly with an enthusiastic gesture and cried in a loud voice: “He
+was my brother anyway and I’m going to stand up for him.”
+
+Then she suddenly put her handkerchief to her nose and blew it
+fiercely. There was a loud murmur of applause. The father made a
+half-hearted attempt to say something, but he subsided. Mrs. McPhillip
+was heard to mumble something, but nobody paid any attention to her.
+Nobody noticed her except Gypo, who still sat on the floor staring at
+her, fondling the memory of her past goodness to him, like a sumptuous
+luxury that he must soon relinquish. Although he had been the cause of
+all the excitement, he was now forgotten in the still greater
+excitement, caused by the argument between the father and daughter of
+the dead revolutionary.
+
+Then Mary turned to Gypo and addressed him.
+
+“If you were a friend of my brother,” she said, “you are quite welcome
+here. Come into the parlour a minute. I want to talk to you.”
+
+Gypo started and looked at Mary with his tufted eyebrows twitching
+ominously like snouts. But he said nothing. She was embarrassed by the
+uncouth stare and flushed slightly. She coughed in her throat and put
+her fingers to her lips. She began to talk rapidly, as if apologizing
+to the uncouth giant for having had the temerity to address him a
+request.
+
+“It’s because Frankie told us that he met you in the Dunboy Lodging
+House before he came here. You are the only one he met in town before
+he came in here, so I thought maybe that . . . you might be
+able . . .”
+
+She stopped in confusion, amazed at the startling change that had come
+over Gypo. He had become seized by some violent emotion as she spoke
+until his face contorted as if he were gazing at some awe-inspiring
+horror. Then she stopped. His face stood still gaping at her. Then for
+some reason or other he jumped to his feet, shouting as he did so at
+the top of his voice: “All right.”
+
+As he bent his head and the upper part of his body to jump to his
+feet, his right trousers pocket was turned mouth to the ground. Four
+silver coins fell to the cement floor with a rattling noise. These
+coins were the change he had received in the public-house.
+
+He was petrified. Every muscle in his body stiffened. His head stood
+still. His jaws set like the teeth of a bear trap that has been sprung
+fruitlessly. Behind his eyes he felt the delicious cold and congealed
+sensation of being about to fight a desperate and bloody battle. For
+he was certain that the four white silver coins lying nakedly, ever so
+nakedly, on the floor, were as indicative of his betrayal of his
+comrade as a confession uttered aloud in a crowded market-place.
+
+Somebody stooped to pick up the coins.
+
+“Let them alone,” shouted Gypo.
+
+He swooped down to the floor and his right palm, spread flat, covered
+the coins with the dull sound of a heavy dead fish falling on an iron
+deck.
+
+“I only wanted to hand them to ye, Gypo,” panted the weazened
+flour-mill worker who had stooped to pick them up. He had been knocked
+to his knees by Gypo’s swoop.
+
+Gypo took no notice of the explanation. As he collected the coins in
+his left fist and rose again, leaning on his right hand, he was
+listening, waiting for the attack.
+
+But there was no attack. Everybody was amazed, mesmerized by the
+curious movements of the irritated giant. They stared with open
+mouths, all except Bartly Mulholland and Tommy Connor, who stood in
+the background, looking curiously at one another with narrowed eyes.
+Darting his eyes around the room Gypo caught sight of the two of them.
+Spurred by some sudden impulse he held up his right hand over his
+head, he stamped his right foot, he threw back his head and shouted,
+looking straight upwards:
+
+“I swear before Almighty God that I warned him to keep away from the
+house.”
+
+There was a dead silence for three seconds. Then a perceptible shudder
+ran through the room. Everybody remembered with horror that there was
+a suspicion abroad, a suspicion that an informer had betrayed Francis
+Joseph McPhillip. Informer! A horror to be understood fully only by an
+Irish mind. For an awful moment each one present suspected himself or
+herself. Then each looked at his or her neighbour. Gradually rage took
+the place of fear. But it had no direction. Even the most daring
+gasped when their minds suggested, that possibly the great fierce
+giant might have had . . . Impossible!
+
+“There’s no man suspects ye, Gypo. Ye needn’t be afraid of that,”
+cried Tommy Connor, the huge red-faced docker with immense jaws like a
+bullock, who had been whispering to Bartly Mulholland.
+
+He had spoken spontaneously with a queer note of anger in his voice.
+
+“Nobody suspects ye. Good God, man! . . .”
+
+There was a chorus of agreement. Everybody was eager to assent to the
+statement that Connor had made. Somebody put his hand on Gypo’s
+shoulder and began to say: “Sure it’s well known that . . .”
+
+But Gypo elbowed the man away fiercely and set out hurriedly across
+the floor towards Mrs. McPhillip. He elbowed the people out of his way
+without looking at them. He stood in front of Mrs. McPhillip. He
+stared at her impassively for a few moments. Then he put his hand
+slowly to his head and took off his hat. He felt moved by an
+incontrollable impulse. All his actions had completed themselves
+before his mind was aware of them. His mind was struggling along
+aimlessly in pursuit of his actions, impotently deprecating them and
+whispering warnings. But it was powerless.
+
+This impulse that had possession of him now was of the same origin as
+the one that controlled him when he was looking into the shop window
+thinking of his youth.
+
+He was beyond himself. His lips quivered. His throat got stuffed. He
+swallowed his breath with an articulate sound, resembling a cry of
+pain. He held out his left hand towards Mrs. McPhillip. He opened the
+hand slowly. The four white silver coins lay there.
+
+“Take it,” he muttered. “Ye were good to me an’ I’m sorry for yer
+trouble.”
+
+He felt a mad desire to pull out the roll of notes and give them to
+her also, but the very thought of such a mad action made him shiver.
+Instead he dropped the four coins into Mrs. McPhillip’s lap.
+
+Mrs. McPhillip glanced at the money and then burst into loud sobs. The
+sound maddened Gypo. He turned about and rushed towards the door. He
+stubbed his foot against the door-jamb and hurtled into the hall. He
+rushed along the passage, cursing and striking furiously at everybody
+that came in his way. He stood outside the street door and breathed
+deeply.
+
+Two men rushed out after him. They were Bartly Mulholland and Tommy
+Connor, the docker.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+“Gypo!”
+
+Gypo had taken three steps down the street when his name came to him
+through the darkness, uttered in that long-drawn-out whisper which is
+the customary intonation among revolutionaries. He contracted his back
+suddenly like an ass that has been struck with violence. Then he
+halted. He did not turn about or reply. He waited. He listened with a
+beating heart to the slow footsteps that came up to him from behind.
+One, two, three, four . . . they stopped. Gypo looked to his left.
+Bartly Mulholland was standing there.
+
+The two of them stood in front of a window through which lamp-light
+was streaming, across Gypo’s chest on to Mulholland’s face.
+Mulholland’s yellow face looked almost black in the lamp-light. It was
+furrowed vertically from the temples to the jaws, with deep black
+furrows. The mouth was large and open, fixed in a perpetual grin that
+had absolutely no merriment in it, that fixed grin of sardonic
+contempt that is nearly always seen on the faces of men who make a
+business of concealing their thoughts. The nose was long and narrow.
+The ears were large. The forehead was furrowed horizontally. The skin
+on the forehead was very white in contrast to the dark skin on the
+cheeks. The furrows on the forehead were very shallow and narrow, like
+thin lines drawn with a sharp pencil. In fact, the whole appearance of
+the face was that of an artificial face, such as that produced in the
+dressing-room of an actor by means of paints, etc. This suggestion was
+strengthened by the appearance of the hair that straggled in loose
+wisps from beneath the shovel-shaped peak of the grey tweed cap. The
+hair appeared to be a dirty brown wig, much the worse for wear. But
+neither the hair nor any portion of the face was artificial.
+Everything had come from the hand of Nature, which seemed, by some
+peculiar whimsey, to have cast this individual for the rôle of a
+conspirator. The face was the face of a clown to hide the
+conspirator’s eyes, except from a very close scrutiny. The eyes were
+the colour of sea water that is dirty with grey sand. These eyes are
+sometimes described as watery blue, but it is a totally wrong
+description. There was an indescribable coldness and depth in them
+which it is beyond the power of any colour to describe. They stared
+without a movement of the pupils or of the lashes at Gypo’s face,
+expressing no emotion whatever. They were not doors of the soul like
+ordinary eyes, but spy holes. They stared glassily like a cat’s eyes.
+
+This curious creature was dressed like a workman, in heavy hobnailed
+boots, brown corduroy trousers with strings tied around the legs below
+the knees, a black handkerchief tied in sailor fashion around his neck
+and an old grey tweed coat that almost reached half-way down his
+thighs. His hands were stuck deep down in the pockets of his coat.
+
+“Where’s yer hurry takin’ ye, Gypo?” he drawled in a low lazy voice,
+as if he were half-drunk or lying on his back in a sunny place on a
+hot summer’s day.
+
+“Who’s in a hurry?” growled Gypo. “How d’ye make out I’m in a hurry?”
+
+“Oh, nothin’ atall. Don’t get yer rag out, Gypo. Ye might talk to the
+people. We never see ye atall now since ye left the Organization. Are
+ye workin’?”
+
+“No,” snapped Gypo angrily. The short ejaculation coming from his
+thick lips sounded like a solitary gunshot coming a long way over
+still air. “I ain’t workin’ an’ all o’ you fellahs, that were supposed
+to be comrades o’ mine, take damn good care to keep out o’ the way,
+for fear I might ask ye for the price of a feed or a flop. Yer a quare
+lot o’ Communists.”
+
+Mulholland drew himself in at the middle, emitted his breath, shrugged
+his shoulders, thrust out his right foot and leaned his weight
+backwards heavily on his left foot. Then he turned his head up
+sideways to let the drizzling rain beat on the back of his neck
+instead of on his face. The grin left his mouth and for a moment he
+appeared to have become angry.
+
+“Ye don’t seem to be in any need o’ money to-night, Gypo,” he breathed
+ever so gently.
+
+Then just as suddenly he broke into an almost fawning and ingratiating
+smile. He continued in his ordinary lazy voice:
+
+“Don’t be tryin’ to make out yer broke, after me seein’ the money that
+fell outa yer pocket in the kitchen beyond just now. Aren’t ye goin’
+to stand us a wet?”
+
+Gypo had begun to shiver. He shivered with minute movements, just as a
+massive tree shivers, when the forest earth is shaken beneath it by a
+heavy concussion. Then suddenly he recovered himself. Without pausing
+to think, he shot out both hands simultaneously like piston-rods.
+Mulholland gasped as the two huge hands closed about his throat. He
+struck out helplessly with his own hands at Gypo’s body. His blows
+were as ineffective as the flapping of a linnet’s wings against its
+cage. Gypo’s face was lit with a demoniac pleasure as he raised
+Mulholland’s body from the ground, clutching it by the throat with his
+two hands. He raised it up like a book which he wanted to read, until
+Mulholland’s eyes were level with his own. Then they both looked at
+one another.
+
+Mulholland’s eyes were still cold and glassy, impenetrable and
+absolutely without emotion. Gypo’s eyes were ferocious and eager, full
+of a mad savage joy. His mouth had shut tight and the skin had run
+taut over the glossy humps on his face, so that his face looked like
+tanned pigskin. Mulholland’s tongue was hanging out.
+
+Then Gypo groaned and prepared to crush out Mulholland’s life between
+his thick fingers, when he was disturbed by a shout from behind. He
+dropped Mulholland to the street like a bag and whirled about. Tommy
+Connor had rushed up from the doorway of No. 44 where he had been
+waiting. He was standing now with his mouth wide open in astonishment
+and terror.
+
+“What’s wrong, boys?” he cried. “In the name o’ God what are ye up
+to?”
+
+“He suspects me,” cried Gypo, “and . . .” Then he sank into silence,
+unable to say any more. His unsatisfied fury choked him.
+
+“Suspects ye of what?” cried Connor. “What d’ye say he suspects ye
+of?”
+
+“I didn’t suspect him of anythin’ atall,” cried Mulholland, rising to
+his feet slowly. His face was contorting with pain. “I only asked him
+to——”
+
+“Yer a liar, ye did,” bellowed Gypo. “Ye suspect me, an’ well I know
+ye, Bartly Mulholland. D’ye think I don’t know ye an’ all about ye? Ye
+got a grudge agin me an’ Frankie McPhillip this long time. Don’t I
+know yer Intelligence Officer for No. 3 Area an’ that yer nosin’
+around now——”
+
+“Shut up or I’ll plug ye where ye stand,” hissed Connor, ramming the
+muzzle of his revolver into Gypo’s side. “Don’t ye know there are
+people listenin’? D’ye want to let the dogs o’ the street know the
+secrets o’ the Organization that ye swore on yer oath to kape?” He
+panted and continued in a lower voice still: “Are ye mad or are ye
+lookin’ to get plugged?”
+
+Gypo’s mouth remained open in the act of beginning a word, but he did
+not utter the word. He half-turned his body in order to look into
+Connor’s face. He saw it, big, angry, menacing, with the nostrils
+distended, so that the insides, blackened with coal, were visible. The
+face was within four inches of Gypo’s face. Connor’s revolver muzzle
+was pressing into Gypo’s right armpit. Gypo feared neither the face
+nor the revolver. He stared with wrinkled forehead at Connor, knowing
+that he could crush him and Mulholland, both together, crush them to
+death, to a shapeless pulp, by clasping them in his arms.
+
+But they were not merely two men, two human beings. They were
+something more than that. They represented the Revolutionary
+Organization. They were merely cogs in the wheel of that Organization.
+That was what he feared, what rendered him powerless. He feared that
+mysterious, intangible thing, that was all brain and no body. An
+intelligence without a body. A thing that was full of plans,
+implacable, reaching out everywhere invisibly, with invisible
+tentacles like a supernatural monster. A thing that was like a
+religion, mysterious, occult, devilish.
+
+Frankie McPhillip had once told him that they tracked a man to the
+Argentine Republic, somewhere the other side of the world. Shot him
+dead in a lodging-house at night too, without saying a word. What d’ye
+think of that?
+
+“All right,” he said at last, “put away yer gat, Tommy. I’ll stay
+quiet.”
+
+A few people had gathered on the far side of the street and were
+looking on curiously. An immense crowd would have already gathered on
+ordinary occasions, but there was tension and anxiety in the district
+that night. Shooting might begin at any minute. It was always so. One
+death brings another in its train. Each man thought this in his own
+mind, although nobody breathed a word. It was a kind of silent terror.
+
+“Come on, boys,” said Connor, “let’s get away from here. We’re
+gatherin’ a crowd.”
+
+“Come on down to Ryan’s,” whispered Mulholland to Gypo, in his usual
+lazy, insinuating voice, as if nothing had happened, “Commandant
+Gallagher is down there. He wants to see ye.”
+
+“What does he want with me?” growled Gypo. “I’m not a member o’ the
+Organization any more. He’s got nothin’ to do with me. I’m not goin’.”
+
+“Come on, man,” whispered Connor, “don’t stand here chawin’. He’s not
+goin’ t’ate ye. Come on. Is it afraid o’ the Commandant ye are? Why
+so?”
+
+“I’m not afraid of any man that was ever pupped,” growled Gypo. “Come
+on.”
+
+The three men walked off abreast, in step like soldiers, their feet
+falling loudly on to the wet pavement, heels first. At the corner the
+footfalls became confused. Gypo spat into the street. Mulholland
+sneezed. They entered the public-house by a little narrow side door
+that had a bright brass knob on it. They went along a narrow passage,
+through a stained-glass swing door, into a brightly lit oblong room.
+
+A man was sitting by a little gas fire on a high three legged stool
+facing the door. When Gypo saw the man he stopped dead.
+
+The man was Commandant Dan Gallagher.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+During the previous autumn a terrific sensation had been caused all
+over Ireland by the farm-labourers’ strike in the M—— district. The
+sensation was brought to a crisis by the murder of the Farmers’ Union
+Secretary. For the first time it was discovered that the Revolutionary
+Organization had spread its influence among the farm-labourers and
+over the whole country. Something had been discovered. A Government
+secret organization had overlapped the Communist organization and
+there was a little effervescence, which was immediately suppressed by
+the Government. Very little leaked out publicly. The newspapers were
+forbidden to talk about it. The Conservative organs in Dublin had
+timid editorials demanding that the Government should take the people
+into its confidence. What really was the extent of this “conspiracy
+against the national safety?”
+
+Then immediately Commandant Dan Gallagher became a public figure and a
+general topic of conversation. He came out of obscurity in a night as
+it were. People suddenly discovered that he was a power in the
+country. He was photographed and interviewed and his photographs
+appeared in all the newspapers both in this country and in England and
+in America. He promptly denounced the murder as a “foul crime against
+the honour of the working class and the whole revolutionary movement.”
+He began to be feared intensely in official quarters as a “slippery
+customer.” This phrase was used at a Government Cabinet meeting.
+
+Just about that time, the leading organ of the English aristocracy had
+a two-column leading article on the subject of Commandant Dan
+Gallagher. In the course of the article a short survey of Gallagher’s
+life was given sarcastically. The following is an extract from the
+article:
+
+  “. . . This flower of Irish manhood grew on an obscure dunghill, in
+  the daily practice of all these virtues, which are indigenous to the
+  Irish soil, if one is to believe the flowery utterances of the
+  politicians on St. Patrick’s Day. His father was a small peasant
+  farmer in Kilkenny. Having assisted very probably in the gentle
+  assassination of a few of his landlord’s agents in the past,
+  reverently decided to devote the activities of his promising son to
+  the service of his God. But Daniel would have none of it. He was
+  meant for other fields of conquest. He succeeded in making himself
+  famous in the ecclesiastical seminary in which he was being prepared
+  for the priesthood, by smashing the skull of one of the Roman
+  priests during a dispute on the playground. The instrument used in
+  this display of boyish gaiety was the favourite Irish weapon, a
+  hurling stick.
+
+  “The young Fionn McCumhaill was expelled and fled the country. He
+  drifted around for eight years without a trace of his whereabouts.
+  Very possibly he spent the time in the United States. We can well
+  imagine that he was favourably received among those organizations in
+  the United States which are governed by Irishmen intent on the
+  destruction of the British Empire by conspiracy, murder, slander,
+  and all the other delectable schemes that come to life so readily in
+  the Gaelic brain. We can imagine him perfecting himself in the arts
+  of gunmanship, deceit and those obscure forms of libidinous vice
+  which are said to be practiced by this morose type of revolutionary
+  in order to dull his sensibilities into an apathy which the
+  consciousness of even the most horrible enormities cannot
+  penetrate. . . .
+
+  “At any rate he has returned to his beloved motherland endowed
+  liberally with those qualities which make him dear to the hearts of
+  all Irishmen of murderous inclinations. These latter unfortunately
+  form as yet a considerable portion of the population of Ireland. Mr.
+  Gallagher has a powerful and enthusiastic following.
+
+  “His brand of Communism is of the type that appeals most to the
+  Irish nature. It is a mixture of Roman Catholicism, Nationalist
+  Republicanism and Bolshevism. Its chief rallying cries are: ‘Loot
+  and Murder.’” . . .
+
+The following is an extract from an article which appeared a little
+while later in the columns of the official organ of the American
+Revolutionary Organization:
+
+  “When the glorious history of the struggle for proletarian
+  liberation in Ireland comes to be written, the name of Comrade Dan
+  Gallagher will stampede from cover to cover in one uninterrupted
+  blaze of glory. . . . No other living man has given nobler service
+  to the world revolution than this sturdy fighter, who rules the
+  workers of Dublin with greater power than is wielded by the Irish
+  bourgeoisie, who are still nominally in the saddle. The collapse of
+  the farm-workers’ strike need not dishearten those comrades who
+  expected great things from the hoisting of the red flag at M—— last
+  October. Comrade Gallagher has not seen fit as yet to call the Irish
+  bourgeois bluff. When the time arrives. . . .”
+
+In November a representative of the International Executive of the
+Revolutionary Organization was sent over from the Continent to make a
+special report on the situation in Ireland. The following is an
+extract from a secret report drawn up by him, after spending three
+months in Ireland secretly touring the country:
+
+  “. . . For the moment it would be a tactical blunder to expel
+  Comrade Gallagher from the International. At the same time there can
+  be no doubt that the Irish Section has deviated entirely from the
+  principles of revolutionary Communism as laid down in the laws of
+  the International. Comrade Gallagher rules the national Organization
+  purely and simply as a dictator. There is a semblance of an
+  Executive Committee but only in name. The tactics are guided by
+  whatever whim is uppermost in Comrade Gallagher’s mind at the
+  moment. Contrary to the orders issued from Head-quarters, the
+  Organization is still purely military and has made hardly any
+  attempt to come into the open as a legal political party. This is
+  perhaps not entirely due to Comrade Gallagher’s fault. There are
+  local causes, arising out of the recent struggle for national
+  independence, which has left the working class in the grip of a
+  romantic love of conspiracy, a strong religious and
+  bourgeois-nationalist outlook on life and a hatred of constitutional
+  methods. This makes it difficult for the moment to check Comrade
+  Gallagher’s hold . . .”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Gallagher’s eyes had opened wide when the three men came into the
+room. Then they narrowed until they became thin slits under their long
+black lashes. He nodded to Mulholland and Connor. Then he stared at
+Gypo.
+
+Gypo returned the stare. The two men, unlike in their features and
+bodies, were exactly alike in the impassivity of their stare. Gypo’s
+face was like a solid and bulging granite rock, impregnable but
+lacking that intelligence that is required by strength in order to be
+able to conquer men. Gallagher’s face was less powerful physically,
+but it was brimful of intelligence. The forehead was high and it
+seemed to surround the face. The eyes were large and wide apart. The
+nose was long and straight. The mouth was thin-lipped. The jaws were
+firm but slender and refined like a woman’s jaws. The whole face had
+absolutely no colour, but there was a constant movement in the cheeks,
+as if tiny streams were coursing irregularly beneath the smooth glossy
+skin. The hair was coal-black and cut close. The ears were large. The
+neck opened out gradually from the base of the shoulders on either
+side, like a hill disappearing into a plain.
+
+Then he jumped off his high stool and stood with his legs wide apart
+in front of Gypo. He was five feet eleven inches and a half in height,
+but Gypo towered over him with his extra two inches. Gallagher wore a
+loose brown raincoat, from his throat almost to his ankles, that made
+his well-built frame look larger and stouter. Yet Gypo, standing bare
+in his dungarees that were now almost sodden with rain, looked immense
+compared to him. Gallagher held his hands in his raincoat pockets
+thrust in front of his body, as if he were pointing pistols at Gypo.
+Gypo held his hands loosely by his sides, two vast red hands hanging
+limply from whitish round wrists. Gallagher wore a broad-brimmed black
+velour hat of a fashionable make. Gypo’s tattered little round hat was
+still perched on his skull, like a tiny school cap on an overgrown
+youngster.
+
+They looked at one another, the one, handsome, well dressed, confident
+and indifferent; the other crude, ragged, amazed, anxious.
+
+“Well, Gypo,” drawled Gallagher, in the irritating, contemptuous tone
+that he affected. “Ye don’t seem glad to see me.”
+
+“Can’t say that I am,” replied Gypo curtly, almost without moving his
+lips. “I don’t see no reason to be glad to see ye, Commandant
+Gallagher. Ye were never a friend o’ mine, an’ I ain’t in the habit o’
+crawlin’ on me belly to anybody that don’t like me. I’m not one o’ yer
+pet lambs any more, so ye needn’t do any bleatin’ as far as I’m
+concerned. One man is as good as another in this rotten ould world.
+I’m usin’ yer own words, amn’t I?”
+
+Gallagher laughed out loud, a merry laugh that showed his white teeth.
+He shrugged his shoulders and took a turn around the room. He took a
+packet of cigarettes from his pocket as he walked and selected one. He
+kept laughing until he paused to light the cigarette over near the
+stained-glass window.
+
+“Yer a queer fish, Gypo,” he said, again laughing, as he paused to
+throw the used match into a spittoon.
+
+Then he cast a glance all round the room and came back again to Gypo.
+Mulholland and Connor watched him all the time with that loving
+interest with which a crowd watches the movements of a champion boxer
+who is walking around the ring in his dressing-gown, preparatory to a
+big fight. They smiled when Gallagher laughed. They stopped smiling
+when he stopped laughing.
+
+Gypo, on the other hand, watched Gallagher’s movements angrily. He
+felt a desire to pounce on him and crush him to death before he could
+do any harm.
+
+Then Gallagher came up to him and caught him by the right shoulder in
+a friendly and confidential manner.
+
+“Listen Gypo,” he said. “You’ve got a grudge against me no doubt for
+getting you expelled from the Organization, but you have nobody to
+blame but yourself. I sent ye down, on the orders of the Executive
+Committee, you and Frank McPhillip, to look after the defence work of
+the strikers. What orders did I give the two of you? Can you remember?
+Well, I’ll remind you. _To keep off the booze and not to use the lead
+unless you were attacked._ But what did you do? The very first thing,
+the two of you got hold of two women. That, of course, must have been
+Frankie’s work because I don’t suppose you were ever a great magnet
+among the women. Women were Frankie’s weak spot, damn it. But anyhow,
+it doesn’t matter very much which of you started the hunt. You tasted
+the honey as well as he did it, as far as was reported to me. The two
+of you got drunk at M—— in company with these two women. You got so
+mad drunk that McPhillip went to shoot up the town. You might have
+assisted him in that pastime, but your time was occupied trying to
+pull a lamp-post up by the roots in Oliver Plunket Street, for a bet
+of a gallon of stout. In the very middle of your entertainment,
+McPhillip met the secretary of the Farmers’ Union and shot him dead.
+That made you get over your drunkenness damn quick, didn’t it? The two
+of you bolted without making any attempt to cover your tracks. You ran
+like two hares. You came into Dublin with a red herring of a story
+about an attack and what not. It was a tall yarn. Well? D’ye know what
+I’m going to tell you, Gypo?”
+
+He paused dramatically and looked Gypo closely in the eyes. Gypo never
+moved a muscle in his face. He grunted interrogatively from somewhere
+deep down in his chest. Gallagher continued very slowly:
+
+“I’m going to tell you this much, Gypo. Only for me, you wouldn’t have
+got away with it as easily as you did that time. There were others who
+wanted to give you this, for disobeying orders.”
+
+He moved his right hand suddenly beneath his raincoat, thrusting it
+forward against Gypo’s lower ribs. Gypo felt the contact of a blunt
+hard metal. He knew it was the muzzle of Gallagher’s Colt automatic
+pistol, but Gypo took no notice of the pistol. He was not afraid of
+the pistol. But he was afraid of Gallagher’s eyes into which he was
+looking steadily. He didn’t like them. They were so cold and blue and
+mysterious. Goodness knows what might be hidden behind them. His face
+began an irregular chaotic movement. His jaws, cheek-bones, nose,
+mouth and forehead convulsed in opposite directions, as if a draught
+of wind had stolen in under the skin of his face and caused it to
+undulate. Then the face set again. The neck swelled and the little
+eyes bulged.
+
+“No use tryin’ yer tricks on me, Danny Gallagher,” he growled,
+knocking the pistol muzzle away with a slight movement of his right
+hand. Although the blow was slight, it caused Gallagher to reel
+backwards two paces before he regained his balance. His face darkened
+for a moment and then again he broke into a smile. Gypo continued in a
+thunderous melancholy voice: “Gallagher, I got no use for you. Them’s
+all lies ye were tellin’ just now about tryin’ to save me life when I
+was before the Court of Inquiry last October. I know very well they
+was. Yerrah, are ye goin’ to tell me that yer not the chief boss an’
+God knows what in the Organization? Who else has got any authority in
+it except yersel’? Yah. I got no use for ye. Yer a liar. Yer no good.
+An’ I’d be in my job yet in the police only for ye an’ yer soft talk.
+It was you that got me outa me job with yer promises o’ the Lord knows
+what. I declare to Almighty God that I done more for yer bloody
+Organization than any other man in Ireland. I done things that no man
+unhung could do. An’ ye went an’ threw me out on account of an ould
+farmer gettin’ plugged. Me an’ McPhillip. What did we get for it?
+Wha’ . . . ye rotten . . .”
+
+Gypo rambled off incoherently into a long string of blasphemous
+curses, raising his voice as he did so. His arms were raised outwards
+in a curve and his head was lowered, as if he were in the act of
+performing a swimming exercise. He frothed at the mouth and glared
+from one to the other of the three men, as if undecided which to
+attack first.
+
+Then suddenly a little wooden panel in the wall to the right was
+raised up and a pretty red head was pushed through. It was Kitty the
+barmaid.
+
+“Lord save us,” she cried, putting her fingers to her lips as she
+looked at Gypo. “Who is that fellah? What’s he doin’ here, Dan?”
+
+“That’s all right, Kitty,” said Gallagher with a light laugh; “he’s a
+friend of mine. We are having a cursing competition.”
+
+And he laughed heartily as he walked to the spittoon with the stub of
+his cigarette.
+
+Gypo turned around and looked at the terrified face of the barmaid. As
+he looked at her beautiful face and her pretty soft hair that
+shimmered in the artificial light, his head swam and his eyes went
+watery. His anger left his body immediately so that it seemed to empty
+and collapse. It had been rigid and like a tree. Now it became loose
+and jointless. He stood with stooping head and wondering eyes, looking
+at the barmaid.
+
+The barmaid, seeing the change she had effected by her presence in the
+unruly giant, grew conceited. She smiled in a superior way and dabbed
+at her hair. She looked around at the others with an air of: “D’ye all
+see that now?”
+
+Then Gallagher came up to the aperture jauntily, took her two hands in
+his and looked enticingly into her eyes. Her eyes winced for a moment
+as if she had become suddenly afraid. Then she smiled softly, wearily,
+like a woman passionately in love. Gallagher bent down his head and
+whispered something in her ear. She burst into a loud laugh. Gallagher
+smiled, listening to her. Then he suddenly sighed and rapped the
+counter curtly.
+
+“Four glasses of Jameson’s quickly,” he said in a low sharp cold
+voice.
+
+The barmaid stopped laughing as suddenly as if she had been stricken
+by a pain. She pulled down the shutter, lisping as she did so: “Yes
+Dan.”
+
+Gallagher came back to Gypo and put his hand again on Gypo’s shoulder.
+Gypo had his two hands now in his trousers pockets. After his
+unsuccessful outburst he felt tired. He wanted to go away somewhere
+and lie down and sleep for days and days. His mind was in a maze. He
+was very tired. As he looked at Gallagher he even felt a longing to
+confide his secret to him. Gallagher’s eyes were so devilishly
+attractive. They seemed to draw things out of Gypo towards themselves.
+They would be able to form a plan and . . .
+
+Gypo had uttered one syllable of Gallagher’s name before he realized
+the real identity of the man and the consequences of a confession to
+him. The name died on his lips. Gallagher smiled.
+
+“Gypo, old boy,” he said in a friendly tone, “ye had better forget all
+that’s past. We’ve got something on hand that’s as much your business
+as ours. So we can act together on it. That’s why I sent Bartly
+Mulholland into McPhillip’s house to look for ye. A pal of yours has
+been done in by the police. D’ye hear? It looks like an informer’s
+job. We have to get that informer. It’s really no business of the
+Organization because Frank had ceased to be a member. He was only an
+ordinary civilian criminal as far as we are concerned. But an informer
+is an informer. He’s got to be wiped out like the first sign of a
+plague as soon as he’s spotted. He’s a common enemy. He’s got to be
+got, Gypo. And it’s up to you to give us a hand in tracking the
+traitor that sent your pal to his death. Because . . .”
+
+At that moment the slide was drawn up again sharply and the barmaid
+appeared at the aperture with four glasses of whisky on a tray.
+Gallagher went to the aperture, paid for the whisky, handed glasses to
+Connor and Mulholland, received his change, pinched the barmaid’s
+cheek and made her scream, laughed, pulled down the shutter himself
+and then advanced smiling to Gypo with a glass of whisky in each hand.
+He held out one glass to Gypo. Gypo stared at it without making any
+movement to take it or reject it.
+
+He had followed all Gallagher’s movements with the stupid and
+suspicious wonder of a terrified wild animal that thinks some trick is
+being played on it. Now he stared at the glass as if he suspected some
+trick in that too.
+
+“Take it,” said Gallagher coldly. “Take it, man, if you’ve any sense.
+It’s better to have me as a friend than as an enemy. If you are not
+going to help us in this job . . . er . . . people might think . . .
+er . . . that . . .”
+
+“Uh,” began Gypo with a shrug of his whole body. Then he stopped
+panting. He went on, speaking at a very high pitch. “It’s not that
+but . . . Look here . . . It’s how . . .” His voice suddenly deepened
+into a hoarse shout, “It’s how I don’t know what I’m doin’.”
+
+He stopped. Gallagher glanced at Mulholland. Mulholland’s cat’s eyes
+both winked inperceptibly.
+
+“I’ve been starvin’ here for the past six months,” continued Gypo,
+suddenly breaking out into a torrent of words. He talked like a negro,
+hollow, thunderous and melancholy. “I’ve been kicking about this town
+an’ every one o’ you fellahs I met passed me by without a word as if I
+never knew ye. I been over in the House there, livin’ from hand to
+mouth on whatever I could bum from sailors and pimps and dockers. I
+got no clothes. I got no money. I got nothin’. An’ then you come up
+all of a sudden with yer soft talk. Well . . . uh . . . how is it
+that . . .”
+
+He came to a stop once more with his chest heaving. He seemed to be
+about to go into a rage once more, but suddenly Gallagher moved closer
+to him and whispered gently and soothingly:
+
+“Look here, Gypo. I’m going to make a fair deal with you. I’ll admit
+you have done a lot for the movement. You have paid the penalty during
+the last six months for the dangerous position you placed the whole
+Organization in last October. We’ll call that quits on one condition.
+If you can give us a clue to the man that informed on Francis Joseph
+McPhillip I’ll get ye taken back again into the Organization at yer
+old job on Head-quarters Staff. Here. Take this drink.”
+
+Gypo’s hand shot out immediately. He grasped the glass and Gallagher’s
+hand both together in his immense paw. The two men almost struggled
+trying to disengage their hands. As soon as the glass was free Gypo
+put it to his lips and drained it. Then he stalked slowly over to the
+mantelpiece and placed the empty glass on it. With his back to his
+companions he paused to wipe his mouth with his sleeve.
+
+He wanted time to compose himself. Gallagher’s proposal had taken him
+so completely by surprise that he was beside himself. Since that
+infernal moment when he kicked open the door of the police-station,
+his whole life had been submerged in a pitch-black cloud that was
+impenetrable and offered no escape. He had been alone, outcast,
+encompassed by a universal horde of enemies. Now, suddenly, he was
+offered a means of escape by the great Gallagher himself. Gallagher,
+the great Gallagher, had made him an offer. He would get back again
+into the Organization. Again people would be afraid of him. Again
+clever men would be always at hand to make plans for him, to provide
+him with money for doing daring things, to protect him, to praise his
+recklessness, his strength and his . . . Mother of Mercy! What Luck!
+
+As he wiped his mouth on his sleeve at the counter an insane idea
+struck him, such was his eagerness to qualify immediately for
+readmission to the Organization. For a moment he contemplated the man
+who had gone into the police-station as a being apart from himself.
+Sound began to gurgle up his throat. It was an attempt on the part of
+his present personality to speak and deliver information against that
+dazed Gypo Nolan who had stumbled into the police-station. But the
+sound froze in his throat, in a ball, hurting him as if his tonsils
+had swollen suddenly. He realized that he himself was one with that
+ponderous fellow, wearing a little tattered round hat, who had gone
+into the police-station. It was only another artifice on the part of
+something within him, his conscience maybe, to persuade him to make a
+confession of his betrayal.
+
+That same impulse had confused him all the time that he was looking at
+Mrs. McPhillip.
+
+And then, just as in the public-house, when he had been terrified by
+Katie Fox, his mind had given birth to an insane plan about a sailor
+in a tavern, so now also his mind conceived an amazing fabrication. It
+entered his brain suddenly, like a thunder-storm, with noise and fury.
+His face and eyes lit up. He opened his mouth. He walked over to
+Gallagher quickly and spoke in a hissing whisper.
+
+“I’ll tell ye who informed,” he gasped. “It’s the Rat Mulligan. It’s
+him as sure as Christ was crucified.”
+
+The three men gathered up close to him. They all looked behind them
+suspiciously and then stared at him with narrowed eyes. There was a
+moment of tense silence. Then each drew a deep breath. Connor slipped
+his finger over the trigger of his revolver.
+
+“The Rat Mulligan!” exclaimed Gallagher at length. “How d’ye make that
+out, Gypo?”
+
+“I’ll tell ye,” cried Gypo triumphantly. Then he paused again and
+looked about him with furrowed brows dramatically. “I didn’t like to
+say anythin’ mesel’ for reasons that everybody knows. A man can never
+be sure of a thing like that. An’ God knows it’s a quare charge to
+bring agin a man. But as ye put it the way ye put it, Commandant,
+about him bein’ me pal an’ me duty to the Cause, well . . . Still!
+Poor Mulligan!”
+
+“Oh, come on,” cried Gallagher twitching with excitement. “Get
+finished with what you have to say. Make your statement, man.”
+
+But Gypo was not to be hurried. An amazing arrogance had taken
+possession of him. He reached out towards the glass of whisky that
+Gallagher still held untasted in his hand.
+
+“Gimme that, Commandant,” he said, “seein’ as yer not tastin’ it.”
+Gallagher nervously handed him the drink. “Thanks. Here’s luck. Ah!
+Good stuff that. Well. This is how it was. Just after Frankie left me
+in the dining-room, I suddenly thought to mesel’ that I had better run
+after him and try an’ head him off from goin’ home. I had been tryin’
+to make him clear out of town again an’ not go near Titt Street, but
+the same cranky fellah that he always was wouldn’t listen to a word of
+what I said. So that I said to mesel’, Lord have mercy on him, ‘Well,
+me fine fellah, I’m not goin’ to get mesel’ into a fever, tryin’ to
+keep ye outa harm’s way an’ get cursed upside down for doin’ so.’ Well
+anyway, as soon as he had gone, I decided to follow him and give him a
+last shout. I ran out into the hall an’ who do I see but the Rat
+sneakin’ around the corner. I ran down the hall. There was the Rat at
+the door with his hands in his overcoat pockets peerin’ up the lane.
+Then he dived out into the street, I chased after him. I was just in
+time to see Frankie turnin’ the corner into the road with the Rat
+crawlin’ after him. It’s as clear as daylight. So it is. Lord have
+mercy on the dead, if I had only thought of it at the time, Frankie
+might have been alive at this minute instead o’ bein’ a frozen corpse.
+Give us another drink, Commandant. Me throat is parched.”
+
+Without a word or a glance Gallagher walked up to the counter and
+rapped at the aperture. Gypo did not even condescend to follow his
+movements. His conceit was now boundless. He realized that he himself
+was amazingly cunning. He even felt a contempt for Gallagher in his
+mind. As for Mulholland and Connor . . . He glanced at them
+appraisingly, as a man might glance at a useful pair of dogs. It was
+the same kind of glance that Gallagher was in the habit of directing
+towards everybody.
+
+Gallagher brought a fresh glass of whisky and handed it to him. He
+took it without a word of thanks. He walked to the spittoon and
+emptied his mouth into it. Then he swallowed the drink again at one
+draught. He put the empty glass on the mantelpiece and coughed deeply.
+He clasped his hands behind his back with a loud sound. He began to
+balance himself backwards and forwards on his heels like a policeman.
+
+“How didn’t I think of it before?” he cried, looking thoughtfully at
+the ceiling.
+
+He was completely immersed now in the contemplation of his own
+cleverness. He did not notice the utter silence with which his story
+had been received by Gallagher and the other two men. He was
+contemplating with pleasure the old days, when he had a criminal in
+his charge, in the cells, at the police-station. He used to stand for
+a whole hour in the stillness of the night, baiting the prisoner,
+terrorizing him with his eyes, with a sudden display of strength, with
+a mad laugh, with silent staring. He was feeling that same sensation
+now. Exhilarated by the whisky he had drunk and carried away by the
+concentrated nerve strain of the past few hours, he imagined that he
+had Gallagher and the other two men at his mercy, that he was a
+policeman and that they were civilians who were asking a favour of
+him, an illegal favour that put them in his power. It was just that
+way in the old days, when he used to sell Gallagher little tit-bits of
+information over a drink; little harmless, he thought, bits of
+information, about head-quarters routine and the disposition of the
+detective-force personnel.
+
+“Think of what before?” Gallagher remarked coldly.
+
+He spoke slowly and casually, looking at Gypo in a brooding way.
+
+“Why, I mean the grudge that the Rat had in for Frankie,” Gypo replied
+confidentially and with an air of great importance.
+
+“What grudge are you referring to?”
+
+“Oh, it’s a long story,” said Gypo with a sigh, as he walked over to
+the spittoon and spat into it. Then he hitched up his trousers. He
+cleared his throat with a tremendous noise. It was very tantalizing.
+“Stand us another drink, Commandant, before they close,” he cried
+suddenly, with amazing nonchalance.
+
+“By the lumpin’ Moses!” ejaculated Gallagher. “You’re a cool customer,
+Gypo. Ha, ha, ha! Well now! You’re worth another drink anyway.”
+
+He winked secretly at Mulholland and Connor as he walked over to the
+aperture. Gypo called after him almost contemptuously.
+
+“Hurry up,” he said, as he looked at the clock with a scowling face,
+“we only have another minute. It’s a minute to eleven.”
+
+Again four glasses of whisky were passed around. Gypo took his and
+swallowed it at a draught. This time he took the glass from
+Gallagher’s hand without asking for it. He swallowed that also at a
+draught, as if he were going through a public exhibition of his
+drinking powers. Mulholland and Connor swallowed their drinks
+hurriedly, as if they were afraid that he was going to take theirs
+too. He walked over to the mantelpiece and put the two empty glasses
+on it. He looked at the five glasses he had emptied and smiled
+broadly. He whacked his chest with a loud sound.
+
+“Come on now, comrade,” said Gallagher sharply, “out with your news.
+No fooling.”
+
+“All right,” said Gypo, thrusting forward his huge head so that it
+looked like a battering-ram, suddenly attached to his collar-bone.
+“D’ye remember the Rat’s sister Susie? She used to be a member o’ the
+Organization. She——”
+
+“All right,” snapped Gallagher angrily. “I remember her. What about
+her? What has she got to do with it?”
+
+“Well, why wouldn’t she have a lot to do with it? She had a baby,
+didn’t she? Didn’t she leave——”
+
+“What d’you know about her baby?” hissed Gallagher. He was deadly
+pale.
+
+“Don’t get yer rag out, Commandant,” leered Gypo with a broad laugh.
+He was slightly drunk and insolent. “Hit a sore spot, wha’? Well, I
+don’t know anythin’ about that. Ye can set yer mind at rest. Frank
+McPhillip was the father o’ that kid an’ he refused to marry her. I
+remember me an’ him were at the back o’ Cassidy’s havin’ a pint one
+night, when somebody came in an’ asked Frankie to step around the
+corner a minute. He was gone a long time so I followed him, suspectin’
+that there might be a bit o’ foul play. But I found him an’ Susie
+jawin’ away to beat the band. She was cryin’ an’ askin’ him to take
+her away with him somewhere. O’ course he didn’t budge. Next day she
+went to the ’Pool. Gone on Lime Street, as far as I can hear. Well!
+You bet yer life that’s why the Rat did it. That’s why he informed.”
+
+Gallagher looked at Mulholland. Mulholland wrinkled his forehead and
+shook his head slightly. Then he looked at Gypo curiously. Connor’s
+mouth was wide open and there was a look of wonder in his eyes as he
+gaped at Gypo. Gypo was tightening his trousers belt.
+
+“Well, Commandant,” he said, when he had finished, “Yer word holds
+good about takin’ me back into the Organization?”
+
+“Steady on,” murmured Gallagher dreamily, staring at the ground. “We
+have to verify your statement first. If your statement is true you’ll
+get back all right.” Suddenly he looked up, smiling, with sparkling
+eyes. He seized Gypo by the right hand and smiled into his face in a
+friendly intimate way. “Listen. There’s a Court of Inquiry to-night at
+half-past one. Be there. Mulholland will take you up there. You can
+arrange to meet him somewhere. You can rely on me, comrade, to fix you
+up again. You did good work before, comrade, and you’ll do good work
+again for the liberation of your class.”
+
+Gypo gripped Gallagher’s hand and squeezed it eagerly. Then he clicked
+his heels and saluted in a grandiose fashion. Then he turned to
+Mulholland.
+
+“I’ll be at Biddy Burke’s place,” he whispered; “about one o’clock.
+I’ll see ye there.”
+
+“Right ye are,” answered Mulholland.
+
+“Good night, boys,” cried Gypo in a loud hearty voice.
+
+Then he stalked out of the room, striking the floor with his heels
+fiercely and clearing his throat.
+
+They all looked after him in silence for two seconds. Then somebody
+called, “Time, gentlemen, time.” Gallagher started.
+
+“Well, I’ll be damned,” he cried, striking his left hand into his
+right.
+
+“It’s him,” hissed Connor, rushing up to Gallagher with open mouth.
+
+“Shut up, you fool,” snapped Gallagher.
+
+“Listen, Commandant,” cried Mulholland excitedly; “it’s him. I’ll
+swear it is, because——”
+
+“Damn you,” snarled Gallagher, “who is asking your opinion? Give me
+your report. Quick, quick. Don’t make a song of it.”
+
+In short jerky statements, with rapid gestures, Mulholland described
+all that had happened at No. 44 Titt Street, Gypo’s excitement, the
+falling of the money to the floor, Gypo’s giving it to Mrs. McPhillip,
+his rush from the house. Then suddenly he began in a whining voice to
+recount all he had done since he had been mobilized at eight o’clock
+on receipt of the news of Francis McPhillip’s death. But Gallagher cut
+him short.
+
+“Cut that out,” he cried. “Did the police find any papers at No. 44?
+No. Good. Was anything found on the body? You don’t know. Well, you
+better find out to-morrow at the inquest. Now beat it. Keep at Gypo’s
+heels like a pot of glue. Find out every damn thing you can. Bring him
+along sharp to the Bogey Hole at one-thirty. Off.”
+
+Mulholland disappeared without a word. Gallagher turned to Connor.
+
+“You Connor. Mobilize six men of your section. Round up Mulligan. Get
+him to the Bogey Hole. Get busy.”
+
+Connor mumbled something and disappeared.
+
+Gallagher remained staring at the ground, alone, lost in thought.
+Drunken voices were singing in the next compartment. Feet were
+shuffling. A droning voice cried constantly: “Time, please, gentlemen,
+time.”
+
+Gallagher’s eyes distended dreamily. He sighed.
+
+“The least little rift,” he murmured to himself, “and everything is
+burst open. Then it’s all up with me. I’ve got to stamp out this
+damned informer whoever he is. It may be Gypo. It might be the Rat,
+though that’s very doubtful. That’s of no consequence. What is of
+consequence is the fact that there is an informer. . . . Good God! An
+informer is the great danger. Every man’s hand is against me. It’s
+only fear that protects me. I must make an example of this fellow.”
+
+His voice had gradually died out. Now silence reigned in the room
+again. The room was hot and stifling, full of the smell of stale drink
+and tobacco. He stared at the floor.
+
+A cockroach peered out of its hole, contemplated a blotch of drink
+four inches away from its snout and then disappeared again. It would
+come out later on and suck the blotch.
+
+The distance was full of sound as if many things were happening there.
+
+Then Gallagher raised his head with a start. He sighed and walked
+rapidly over to the aperture. He tapped the panel with his knuckles.
+It was raised up almost immediately. The pretty red head appeared.
+Gallagher nodded. The red head disappeared again and the slide was
+pulled down. Gallagher waited. After three seconds a little door to
+the left was opened quietly and the barmaid stepped into the room,
+shutting the door carefully behind her. She rushed immediately to
+Gallagher and threw her arms around his neck. He kissed her lips
+several times rapidly. Then he unwound her arms.
+
+“Got anything for me?” he asked.
+
+She nodded and took a piece of paper from within the breast of her
+black dress. He stuck it within his raincoat.
+
+“Right,” he muttered dreamily.
+
+Then he kissed her again on the lips and patted her cheek. He took a
+pace away, but she grabbed at him. She held him, looking beseechingly
+into his face.
+
+“Have ye got nothin’ to say to me, Dan?” she whispered, almost
+sobbing.
+
+“For goodness’ sake, Kitty, have sense,” he muttered savagely. “This
+is no time for jig-acting.” He put a finger to his throat. “I’m up to
+here in it. The whole Organization is in danger.”
+
+“O Lord! What is it, Dan? Tell me.”
+
+“An informer. See ye to-morrow. Let me go. Good night.”
+
+He kissed her on the forehead. Her arms loosened. He was gone. She
+looked after him dejectedly. Then she shivered and gripped her
+breasts.
+
+Gallagher walked up Titt Street. Here and there a workman recognized
+him and saluted respectfully. He did not acknowledge the salutes. He
+wheeled sharply in at the door of No. 44 and knocked. The door was
+opened almost immediately by Mary McPhillip. She also started and put
+her hand to her breast when she saw him.
+
+“Good evening, Mary,” he said gently, holding out his hand. “May I
+come in? I want to speak to your mother.”
+
+“Yes,” said Mary excitedly; “mother is in the kitchen, but you had
+better come into the parlour. Father is in the kitchen, too, and there
+would surely be a row if he saw you.”
+
+“Oh, that’s all right,” said Gallagher. “Is there anybody else there?”
+
+“No, everybody else is gone.”
+
+“Who is that yer talkin’ to, Mary?” came Jack McPhillip’s voice from
+the kitchen.
+
+“Nobody atall, father,” cried Mary.
+
+“Don’t I hear a man’s voice,” cried the father. “Who is he?”
+
+“Hist! It’s all right,” whispered Gallagher, pushing past her as she
+tried to speak again. “He won’t bite me. It’s just me, Mr. McPhillip.
+How are you? I’m very sorry to hear of your trouble.”
+
+The two of them met at the kitchen door. They stared at one another
+for a moment. Then Gallagher made a movement to come forward and
+McPhillip with a little start, moved backwards. He did not speak until
+he was near the bed again.
+
+“Oh, it’s you, is it?” he said angrily. “An’ what brings you here at
+this hour of the night?”
+
+Gallagher took no notice of him. He turned to Mrs. McPhillip who was
+still in the same position by the fire, telling her rosary beads.
+
+“I am sorry to trouble you, Mrs. McPhillip,” he said gently and
+respectfully, “in the middle of your . . . eh . . . but there’s a
+question or two I have to ask you for the sake of him that’s dead.
+Would you be kind enough to——”
+
+“And what right have you to ask a question or two?” cried McPhillip,
+raging because Gallagher had refused even to talk to him.
+
+He was sitting on the bed now. He sat on the bed timidly, as if he
+were in somebody else’s house.
+
+Gallagher turned to him slowly and looked at him fiercely in the eyes.
+
+“I have the right,” he said, “of a revolutionary to track a traitor to
+the cause.”
+
+“Ha!” sneered McPhillip. “An’ what kind of a revolutionary d’ye call
+yersel’?”
+
+“A revolutionary Communist,” answered Gallagher.
+
+Then he turned about insolently and bent down his head to talk to Mrs.
+McPhillip.
+
+“Communist be damned,” cried McPhillip, jumping off the bed. “D’ye
+know what I’m goin’ to tell ye? Ye——”
+
+“Father,” cried Mary, wringing her hands, “don’t——”
+
+“Shut up, you young rip,” stamped the father; “am I master in me own
+house or am I not? You, ye Communist, as ye call yersel’! Yer the
+greatest scoundrel in Ireland. Yer the greatest enemy o’ yer class.
+Now, let me alone, Mary, or I’ll tan yer skin for ye. Let me tell
+him. . . . Let me . . . Let go,” he screamed shrilly, as she seized
+him tightly about the body and began to push him forcibly from the
+room.
+
+He placed his hands and feet against the jambs of the door and turning
+his head around, he continued in a half-hysterical voice:
+
+“It’s the likes o’ me that’s the revolutionaries, but we get no credit
+for it. It’s the likes o’ me that does the hard work, eddicatin’ me
+fellow-men, an’ at the same time strikin’ an honest blow for better
+conditions. But men like you are criminals. Criminals, criminals,
+that’s what yez are. Don’t lay hands on yer father, Mary. Don’t——”
+
+“I’m not touching you,” cried Mary. “Come on now. Get to bed.”
+
+She got him into the hall. He sighed and broke into half-stifled sobs.
+Going up the stairs he kept saying in a low melancholy voice:
+
+“If I had only put him on the scaffoldin’ with me, instead of
+eddicatin’ him, maybe he’d be alive an’ an honest man to-day. If I had
+only . . .”
+
+Then his voice died away into a mumble as a door closed behind him
+upstairs.
+
+When Mary returned to the kitchen after putting him to bed, she found
+Gallagher sitting beside her mother, writing rapidly in a notebook. He
+had taken off his hat. His close-cropped black head looked very
+handsome to her. Still she shivered looking at it. The side face
+looked very cruel, with the brooding expression on it, as he looked
+downwards at the notebook.
+
+She stood watching him until he finished writing. Then he sighed. He
+got up. He said a few words to Mrs. McPhillip. Then he shook hands
+with her and turned to Mary.
+
+“I want to speak to you,” he said.
+
+She led him into the parlour excitedly. It was dark there and she had
+to fumble around for matches to light the gas. She couldn’t find them.
+Gallagher offered his box. He lit a match. She went to take it from
+him. Their fingers touched. She started and stumbled over something.
+The match fell from his fingers and went out. He reached out his hands
+to catch her as she stumbled. He caught her by the wrists and held her
+tightly. They had not spoken a word. It was very queer in the
+darkness. Their faces were very close together, but they could not see
+one another. They stood still, each of them mastered by some strange
+impulse, that bound their tongues. They stood still, in the utter
+darkness and silence of the little stuffed room, for almost a minute.
+Then Gallagher spoke. He spoke in a soft whisper. The sound of his
+voice was soft and caressing. His lips were so close to hers that his
+breath came moist to her lips. There was a catch in his voice, as if
+the volume of sound were not strong enough to steady itself on the
+air.
+
+“Mary,” he said, “I want you to come to a Court of Inquiry with me
+to-night.”
+
+She made no attempt to reply. Neither did he seem to expect a reply.
+It seemed that the words and their implication were foreign to the
+purpose of their meeting here. It seemed that the coursing of their
+blood and the confused beating of their hearts, was in response to
+some prearranged assignation of declared love.
+
+But there had never been a question of amorous relations between them.
+They had never met in privacy like this before. Their previous
+meetings were more in the nature of quarrels. Mary had always disputed
+with Gallagher, particularly of late, when she had become violently
+opposed to him. But now in the darkness, in the solitude, both she and
+he were mastered by some amazing emotion that was inexplicable.
+
+“Dan,” she whispered suddenly, “you make me afraid. Why are we
+standing here in the darkness? What do you want with me?”
+
+“I want you to revenge your brother,” said Gallagher suddenly, as if
+he had obeyed an unforeseen impulse and broached an unexpected
+subject, with which his mind had hitherto only toyed nervously. “I
+want you to join me, Mary. I want you to take your brother’s place in
+the Organization. But a greater place than he held. No. It’s not your
+brother’s place I want you to take but . . .”
+
+“Dan, what are you talking about?” she panted in a terrified voice.
+
+There was a pause during which Gallagher imperceptibly moved his face
+closer to hers. Their lips met. They kissed gently. Then she drew back
+suddenly, shivering violently. She wanted to rush away and to shout,
+but the fascination of his voice was upon her. His voice and the
+glamour of his face. His face and the romance of his life. She was
+bound suddenly by it. Suddenly too, it became apparent to her why she
+had been eager to convert him. It had been in order to meet him, with
+a plausible excuse.
+
+And she was almost engaged to Joseph Augustine Short, who was a
+“gentleman,” who would place her in a respectable sphere of life, who
+would free her for ever from the hated associations of her slum life
+with its squalor, its revolutionary crises, its damnable insecurity,
+its soul-devouring monotony.
+
+Mother of Mercy! Was she in love with Gallagher? Was she going to be
+drawn into the web of his conspiracies by the deadly fascination of
+his face and of his voice, by the romance of his life?
+
+“Mary,” he murmured at last, “you are the remainder of me. The two of
+us together would make a complete whole. There would be nothing else
+wanting to the two of us, no unfulfilled . . . er . . . well . . .
+it’s not that either. I have not fully worked out that part of the
+theory. I have approached it from another point of view.”
+
+“What is it, Dan?” She drew away her face farther and loosened one
+hand. He was wrapped in dreams now and he did not attempt to stop her.
+In fact he let her go altogether suddenly and sat on the table, simply
+holding her right hand in his. “What do you want with me?” she said
+again.
+
+“I want you to join me,” he muttered almost inaudibly, wrapped in his
+thoughts.
+
+“Dan, I don’t understand,” she gasped, afraid of his voice.
+
+“How? How?” he muttered. “Why don’t you understand? I want you to join
+me.”
+
+“Do you mean . . . to . . . to . . . to marry you?”
+
+“Oh rot,” he cried irritably, waking from his half-reverie and turning
+towards her. “These ridiculous conventions don’t enter my
+consciousness. Not only have I no respect for them, but they don’t
+enter my consciousness. You understand the significance of that. My
+personality is entirely in keeping with my mission in life. For me all
+these words attain their true values. Marriage, for instance, is truly
+a capitalist word meaning an arrangement for the protection of
+property so that legitimate sons could inherit it. So I don’t have to
+argue with it in my own mind in order to rid myself of a belief in it.
+Most men have to do that. I am a hundred years before my time. I want
+to destroy the idea of property. It is my mission. I don’t want to
+leave property to my children. I don’t want children. They are nothing
+to me. The perpetuation of my life is in my work, in men’s thoughts,
+in the fulfillment of my mission. That’s why I want you to join me,
+because I feel something, an affinity maybe—that’s a wrong word
+though—between you and myself. I am sure there is a natural
+relationship, chemical maybe, between the two of us. We are two parts
+of one whole. I am sure of that. No, damn it all. What a ridiculous
+idea! I don’t want you to join me for the purpose of cohabitation. I
+have no time to make sentiment a main impulse of my desire to live.
+Neither have you. I am certain of it. You are governed by other
+impulses. Maybe you don’t know it. Probably you are afraid to analyse
+yourself. But I know it. I don’t know it. I feel it. ‘Know’ is not a
+proper word. It’s out of use. ‘Feel’ is better. It is an outcome of
+the new consciousness that I am discovering. But I haven’t worked that
+out fully yet. It’s only embryonic.”
+
+He paused. She started when he stopped. She had not been listening to
+what he had been saying. She had been arguing with herself. She had
+not succeeded in settling with her conscience what she had been
+discussing when he stopped. She bit her lip and started. She was
+blushing.
+
+“Tell me, Dan,” she whispered, “do you believe in anything? Do you
+even believe in Communism? Do you feel pity for the working class?”
+
+Gallagher uttered an exclamation of contempt and shrugged his
+shoulders. He panted as he spoke, such was the rapidity of his words,
+in an effort to keep pace with the rapidity of his tempestuous
+thoughts.
+
+“No,” he said, “I believe in nothing fundamentally. And I don’t feel
+pity. Nothing fundamental that has consciousness capable of being
+understood by a human being exists, so I don’t believe in anything,
+since an intelligent person can only believe in something that is
+fundamental. If I could believe in something fundamental, then the
+whole superstructure of life would be capable of being comprehended by
+me. Life would resolve itself into a period of intense contemplation.
+Action would be impossible. There would be no inducement for action.
+There would be some definite measurement for explaining everything.
+Men seek only that which offers no explanation of itself. But wait a
+minute. I haven’t worked out that fully yet. It’s only in the
+theoretical stage yet. I have no time.
+
+“But you spoke of pity. Pity? Pity is a ridiculous sensation for a man
+of my nature. We are incapable of it. A revolutionary is incapable of
+feeling pity. Listen. The philosophy of a revolutionary is this.
+Civilization is a process in the development of the human species. I
+am an atom of the human species, groping in advance, impelled by a
+force over which neither I nor the human species have any control. I
+am impelled by the Universal Law to thrust forward the human species
+from one phase of its development to another. I am at war with the
+remainder of the species. I am a Christ beating them with rods. I have
+no mercy. I have no pity. I have no beliefs. I am not master of
+myself. I am an automaton. I am a revolutionary. And there is no
+reward for me but the satisfaction of one lust, the lust for the
+achievement of my mission, for power maybe, but I haven’t worked out
+that yet. I am not certain that the lust for power is a true impulse,
+a true . . . but listen. That can come later. Can you give me an
+answer now? Will you join me?”
+
+“No . . . no, Dan. Stop. Listen.” She gasped, holding him back. “Not
+now. Later on I’ll tell you. On a night like this, with death in the
+house, how can you talk of . . . ?”
+
+“Why?” he uttered fiercely. “What night would be better suited for you
+to join me? Don’t you want to avenge your brother’s death? Don’t you
+want . . .”
+
+“Dan, Dan,” she gasped, struggling away as he attempted to seize her
+in his arms, “don’t touch me or I’ll scream. I’m so excited.”
+
+There was a pause. Their breathing was loud in the silence. A noise
+came from the kitchen.
+
+“That’s mother going to bed, Dan,” said Mary hurriedly. “You must go,
+Dan.”
+
+“Will you come to the Court of Inquiry to-night?”
+
+“Dan, I’d rather——”
+
+“You must come, Mary. You must. You——”
+
+“All right, Dan, I’ll come.”
+
+“Good. I’ll come for you. Be ready at one o’clock.”
+
+“All right, I’ll be ready.”
+
+“Be waiting in the parlour here. I’ll knock on the window.”
+
+“All right, Dan. Go now immediately. I’m coming, mother. Good night.”
+
+He bent hurriedly and kissed her lips. Then he stumbled from the room.
+She waited until the hall door closed behind him. Then she shuddered
+as the barmaid had done.
+
+Gallagher walked away northwards furiously, with glittering eyes,
+thinking.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+Walking out from the public-house into the street, Gypo felt as if he
+had leapt suddenly into an arena, where he was to perform astounding
+feats, while an amazed audience, with two million eyes, gazed silent
+and spell-bound. He thrust his head into the air. He let his arms hang
+limply from his shoulders in front of his body. He took two staggering
+steps forward and uttered a long-drawn-out yell.
+
+It was that peculiar yell that mountaineers will utter in the west of
+Ireland, when the fair is over in the district town and night is
+falling, as they issue from the public-houses, bareheaded and
+wild-eyed, dragging their snorting and shivering mares after them by
+the halter.
+
+Gypo’s yell was just such a one. It was like a challenge to mortal
+combat issued to all and sundry. He felt beside himself with strength.
+He was free again. Had not Gallagher given him his word that
+everything would be all right? Would he not be taken back again into
+the Organization? Had he not thrown suspicion on to the Rat Mulligan?
+He was free again. Ye-a-a-aw!
+
+He staggered to the kerbstone and yelled, letting his body go
+completely limp with ecstasy. Then, breathing heavily through his
+nostrils, he stood erect and looked about him to see what effect his
+yell had produced. There was a small crowd of people near by. They had
+just come out of Ryan’s public-house and from Shaughnessy’s, another
+public-house ten yards away at the corner of a lane. The corner was
+brilliant with light, from the public-houses, from a fried-fish and
+potato shop, and from a drapery shop where the lights were kept on all
+night by the owner, with the idea that the light might terrify gunmen
+and housebreakers.
+
+Gypo stood out in the blaze of light, on the kerbstone, with the beads
+of rainwater on his white woollen muffler reflected like dewdrops in
+the artificial light. The people looked at him in amazement and with
+that intense satisfaction which the proletariat of the slums always
+derives from something unexpected and extraordinary happening, at no
+cost to themselves. A spectacle had presented itself. The crowd began
+to swell.
+
+Gypo had not intended to carry the affair any further. In fact he had
+not intended to yell at all. But when he saw the crowd he became
+amused. He pitched on a man who stood near, a tall, thin, respectably
+dressed man, who had a sour expression on his face.
+
+“What are ye lookin’ at me for?” cried Gypo, staring the fellow in the
+face insolently.
+
+“I’m not lookin’ at ye,” snapped the man irritably.
+
+“Yer a liar,” bellowed Gypo, “don’t I see ye lookin’ at me?”
+
+“Well a cat can look at a king,” cried the stranger, thrusting out his
+chin and spitting venomously to his left.
+
+“What are ye sayin’ about kings?” said Gypo angrily.
+
+“Better say nothin’ about kings around here, me lad. I think yer
+lookin’ for trouble. I’ve got a good mind to give ye a wallop in the
+jaw.”
+
+“Ye would, would ye?” cried the stranger, making a move to take his
+hands out of his coat pockets.
+
+But he was too late. Gypo’s right hand swung around. The man went down
+like a bag of nails dropped to an iron deck. Somebody cried: “Lord,
+save us.” Gypo stood over the fallen man with his chest heaving. A
+policeman appeared from somewhere in the rear. He advanced rapidly,
+shouldering the people and trying to snatch something from under his
+cape as he made for Gypo.
+
+“Look out, look out,” cried an old woman, through her cupped hands.
+
+Gypo looked on either side hurriedly and then he heard the excited
+breathing of the policeman approaching from behind. He tried to turn
+about, but the policeman was upon him. The policeman’s hands closed
+about his biceps and jerked back both his arms to lock them behind his
+back. The arms were half-way back before Gypo could mobilize his vast
+strength to arrest their retreat. There was a loud snap of bones being
+strained taut when Gypo’s strength collided with the policeman’s
+strength at the point on Gypo’s biceps where the policeman’s hands
+rested.
+
+Both men groaned loudly. The policeman’s boots tore at the wet
+pavement, making a noise like dry cloth being rent, as he struggled to
+keep firm. Slowly Gypo leaned forward until the policeman’s body was
+on his back.
+
+Then he thrust back his head with a snarl. His poll collided with the
+policeman’s chin. There was a dull thud and a snap. Gypo uttered an
+oath and thrust his head downwards towards his knees, holding his
+thighs rigid. Before the head had reached the knees, the policeman had
+hurtled through the air with a scream of terror, right over Gypo’s
+head.
+
+He fell with three separate soft sounds to the street, with his right
+side against the concrete wall of a house. He fell on his back. He
+rose again in the middle, resting on his right hand and on his heels.
+He brandished his left hand towards Gypo and at the same time he tried
+to grip a fleeing spectator with it. Then he moaned and subsided
+again.
+
+“Run, Gypo,” said somebody.
+
+Gypo ran towards a lane at a fast run. He was followed by a crowd.
+Others gathered around the fallen policeman.
+
+Gypo halted at the far end of the lane, in a dark corner. The crowd
+gathered around him. Everybody was panting with excitement. They all
+stared down the lane towards the blaze of light where the policeman
+lay. They began to jabber.
+
+“I can see trouble comin’,” said one. “The sojers ’ll be here shortly.
+Then yer goin’ to see some pluggin’.”
+
+“Gwan,” said another contemptuously. “There’s no sojers goin’ to come
+down here. Ye wouldn’t get a sojer in the town to dare come within a
+mile of Titt Street on this blessed night, after what happened
+to-day.”
+
+At the mention of “what happened to-day,” a man cursed, a woman
+crossed herself piously under her shawl, an angry silence fell.
+
+Gypo stood with his hands in his pockets, paying no heed to the talk.
+With his lips stuck out, he was looking gloomily down the lane towards
+the blaze of light. He was enjoying himself immensely.
+
+“Hist, hist!” somebody cried. “Look, look.”
+
+Two policemen crossed the blaze of light, bearing their fallen comrade
+between them. A few women and small boys followed them. Then two more
+policemen came, hauling along the man whom Gypo had struck. They were
+dragging him unceremoniously, holding him by the armpits, with his
+feet trailing along the ground and his arms dangling. They were
+probably under the impression that it was he who had felled their
+comrade. The man made an effort to wrench himself free, but they
+tightened their hold on his arms. He writhed and went limp again,
+allowing himself to be dragged lifelessly. A woman, with straggling
+red hair and a child on her back in a black shawl, danced in front of
+the policemen, screaming and gesticulating, demanding the man’s
+release. Then the procession passed out of sight with a mad rush of
+feet and a medley of indiscriminate noises.
+
+“Let’s go back,” muttered a young man who had a slight hump.
+
+Gypo grunted and hitched up his trousers. He put his hand to his head
+to settle his hat jauntily before leading the way back. But instead he
+uttered an oath. His little round torn hat was not there. His massive
+round skull stood bare under the night. It stood naked, hummocked and
+gashed here and there, like a badly shorn sheep. He traversed the
+skull with his right palm, in little flurried rushes, as if he had had
+a vague suspicion that the hat was hiding somewhere along the expanse
+of skull. Then he set out at a wild rush down the lane, followed by
+the crowd, to retrieve the hat, as if his life depended on it. For the
+first time, since Gallagher had given his word, terror again invaded
+his mind. If they discovered the hat they might be able to discover
+the identity of that ponderous fellow who had gone into the
+police-station. . . .
+
+But no. He rushed into the road and brought up with a slither of his
+right foot on the wet pavement. The hat was lying in the gutter before
+his eyes. It lay crushed beside a flattened little cardboard chocolate
+box and an orange skin. It had been trodden on by a small bare foot.
+The impress of a wet heel was on its right side.
+
+He grabbed it up hurriedly, punched it into shape and crammed it on to
+his skull with both hands. Then he laughed aloud and turned to the
+people.
+
+“I thought I had lost it,” he cried affectionately. “I had it this two
+years.”
+
+The crowd gaped at the hat as if it had magical properties. Others who
+had run up without knowing what had already happened gaped at Gypo’s
+humpy face, at his ruminative eyes and his eyebrows that were like
+snouts, at the red fat backs of his hands, as he held them to his
+throat tightening the white woollen muffler about his neck. There were
+agitated whispers on the outskirts of the ragged crowd.
+
+“He’s stronger than any bull.”
+
+“How? Why? What did he do?” from a dozen throats.
+
+“Wait till I tell ye. I saw him with me own eyes send Scrapper Moloney
+o’ the B Division flyin’ over his shoulder like a man divin’ off the
+Bull Wall. I declare to me——”
+
+“I know him well. He used to be a bobby himself once. His name is
+Nolan. Gypo Nolan. Didn’t ye ever hear of him?”
+
+“Sure; usen’t he be pals with Frankie McPhillip that was shot to-day?”
+
+“Sure I was,” broke in Gypo, overhearing the remark; “an’ when ye
+speak o’ the dead, ye might add Lord Have Mercy on him.”
+
+“Hear, hear,” cried several voices. “Hit him a puck in the jaw. Who is
+he?”
+
+A noisy argument and a scuffle arose. The culprit was hustled away,
+kicked and struck about the face, until he made his escape by running
+at full speed up the lane. Then they all crowded around Gypo again.
+
+He stood head and shoulders above them, revelling in the attention he
+was attracting. He stood so impassively with his arms folded, that he
+might be mistaken for a great scowling statue at a distance. Then he
+suddenly raised his right hand and made a circular movement with it.
+
+“Come on,” he cried wildly. “I’m goin’ to give everybody here a feed.
+Come on. Come on every mother’s son in this crowd that’s hungry.”
+
+He waved his arm towards the fried-fish and chip shop and headed off
+towards the door.
+
+“Hurrah!”
+
+“Long life to ye, me darlin’ son of Erin.”
+
+“More power to yer elbow.”
+
+“Up the rebels.”
+
+Gypo strode in front of the disreputable throng as proud as a king
+leading his courtiers. They came after him with pattering feet,
+panting, pushing, snivelling, emitting that variegated murmur of sound
+that comes from a pack of wild things in a panic, coming from afar,
+unseen, without a guiding reason. They were the riff-raff and the
+jetsam of the slums, the most degraded types of those who dwell in the
+crowded warrens on either bank of the Liffey. But to Gypo they were an
+audience to acclaim his words and his deeds.
+
+“Before long ye’ll see me cock o’ the walk around here,” he thought,
+as he strode into the shop. “Me an’ Gallagher. Come on, every man jack
+an’ woman too. Come on.”
+
+They packed the little shop to the door. There was an overflow
+outside. It was warm within after the drizzling rain and the sharp
+wind outside. The air within the shop became almost immediately full
+of the vapour of human breath. The low murmur of breathing could be
+heard distinctly through the hum of whispered conversation.
+
+“Hey there, towny,” cried Gypo to the shopkeeper, “chuck us a feed for
+all hands. I’m payin’ for the lot.”
+
+The shopkeeper was an Italian, a dark middle-aged fellow with
+plaintive eyes. He looked at Gypo and then at the crowd. Curiosity,
+fear, suspicion and surprise raced across his face. Then he smiled and
+nodded his head. He said something in a foreign language to the girl
+who stood behind him and then he began immediately to put steaming
+portions of potatoes and fish into slips of old newspapers that lay
+ready to hand. The girl, a red-cheeked young woman with big black
+eyes, dressed in white, busied herself, pushing to and fro on a long
+arrangement like a sink, more fish and potatoes that were being fried.
+A crackling noise came from this frying. A hot, sweet and acrid smell
+permeated the whole room.
+
+The starved wastrels revelled in that smell. They looked towards the
+frying food with eager mouths and glistening eyes. Their nostrils
+smelt its heat and its savour greedily. Their faces were all fierce
+and emaciated. Their bodies were unkempt, crooked, weazened. But just
+then, the joy of an unexpected banquet had filled even their haggard
+and stupefied souls with a pleasure that made them laugh and chatter
+irresponsibly like children. The sorrows and the miseries of life were
+forgotten in that moment of common rejoicing. And perhaps that joyous
+mumble of chattering voices, rising through the steam in that slum
+eating-house, was a beautiful hymn of praise to the spirit of life.
+
+And Gypo stood among them like some primeval monster just risen from
+the slime in which all things had their origin.
+
+While around him crowded the others, like insects upon which he had
+been destined to fatten.
+
+As he looked about him, with the slow, languorous eye movement of a
+resting bull, he felt the exaltation and conceit of a conqueror at the
+hour of victory. An intelligent being, gifted with such strength and
+the power to analyse his sensations, would have said: “This is the
+greatest moment of my life.” But Gypo did not think. There was nothing
+about him in relation to which he could think. A queen will not dream
+of flaunting her beauty and her raiment at a boors’ banquet. But she
+will, on a public holiday, bow to their clamorous cheers. So with
+Gypo.
+
+The cumbersome mechanism of his mind had been put in motion that
+evening by the necessity for forming a plan after leaving the
+police-station. The unaccustomed strain had unmoored it. It floundered
+about until Gallagher’s promise perched it on a foolish eminence
+whence it regarded the rest of humanity with contempt. It sprawled its
+ponderous foundations on that crazy eminence as arrogantly as if it
+were about to rest there for eternity.
+
+He rolled his eyes about at the heads that were standing thickly
+around him, some on a level with his biceps, some on a level with his
+waist, while here and there a tall man like himself, stood with a red,
+lean, knotted neck strained forward, with throbbing throat, towards
+the food counter.
+
+“Biga lot o’ people,” murmured the Italian suddenly, making a polite
+gesture with his hands to indicate the number of people present and
+the nature of his suspicions.
+
+“That’s all right,” muttered Gypo. “Count ’em as ye hand out the grub.
+I’ll pay. Don’t you fret yersel’. Keep back there.”
+
+He had been standing with his palms against the edge of the
+marble-topped counter. Now, in order to put his hand into his right
+trousers pocket, he had to pick up a small-sized man and crush him in
+between two women, who leaned away behind their shawls. Then he thrust
+his hand into his pocket and fingered the wad of Treasury notes. The
+very touch of them sent a wave of remembrance through his body. A
+slight tremor ran up, almost tangibly like a breath of cold wind in a
+hot place, up the extent of his body until it entered his brain. The
+remembrance of the origin of that wad of notes staggered him
+momentarily. He remembered the fat white hand, surmounted by a
+carefully brushed blue sleeve, that had handed him the wad over a
+desk, saying ever so icily: “You’ll find twenty pounds there. Go.”
+
+But after the first shock he curled his thick upper lip slightly and
+licked it with the tip of his tongue. The movement of his mouth had
+the appearance of a grin. The girl who happened to glance at him just
+then, found his gaze centred on her. She dropped the fish slice into
+the pan with some sort of an exclamation in a foreign language. But
+Gypo, though he was looking at her, did not see her. He was busy with
+his clumsy thick fingers, separating a single note from the roll
+without taking the roll from his pocket. At last he succeeded in doing
+so. He grunted and pulled out a single Treasury note.
+
+He held it up.
+
+“Here ye are,” he cried. “This’ll pay for the lot. Hand out the grub.”
+
+The Italian smiled immediately and began to serve the packages into
+the eager hands that reached out for them. He counted out loud as he
+did so: “One, two, three, four . . .”
+
+An uproar commenced immediately. People crowded in from the door
+struggling to get served. Those who had been served struggled to get
+out into the street, with their food in steaming, dripping, paper
+packages in their hands. Altercations arose. The shop was full of
+sound. There were catcalls, whistling, cursing and laughing. Then a
+big docker brought the uproar to a climax by smashing his big boot
+through the wooden bottom of the counter, uttering a drunken yell as
+he did so. Then he sprawled over the counter, laughing foolishly and
+reaching out with his two hands towards the girl who shrank away
+terrified. The Italian uttered an exclamation of terror. Gypo turned
+towards the docker, lifted him up by the back and shouted:
+
+“Keep quiet.”
+
+The two words re-echoed through the shop, like two rocks rolled down
+from opposite precipices and meeting in a glen, with two separate
+sounds, a heavy thick sound as they collide, a loud rasping sound as
+their splintered fragments fly clashing into the air.
+
+The words had scarcely passed out the door into the night before a
+silence fell. Everybody stood still. One man stopped in the act of
+sucking a fish-bone between his lips.
+
+“Now carry on,” continued Gypo, “but don’t kick up a row like a lot o’
+cannibals. Don’t disgrace yer country. A man ud think ye didn’t see a
+bite for a year.”
+
+Then he himself turned towards the counter and asked the Italian how
+many meals had been served. Twenty-four meals had been served. He
+threw the pound note on the counter.
+
+“Take out o’ that for three rounds for mesel’,” he said.
+
+Then he pushed back his hat, drew a paper full of food towards him and
+began to eat. Without speaking, the Italian held the Treasury note
+between him and the electric light and peered at each side of it
+several times. Then he nodded his head and opened his till.
+
+Mulholland had also strained his neck to peer at the Treasury note. He
+had been standing in the angle of the doorway all the time, silent and
+immovable. As soon as he saw the pound note, he drew out into the open
+and craned over the heads of the people to look at it. A neighbour
+noticed him, a ragged little fellow, who mistook the cause of
+Mulholland’s curiosity.
+
+“Didn’t ye get any grub?” said the little man to Mulholland. “It’s yer
+own fault if ye didn’t. Come on, man. Don’t stand there hungry. Go on
+up to the counter.”
+
+He caught Mulholland by the arm and tried to push him towards the
+counter.
+
+“Leave me alone,” hissed Mulholland. “I don’t want any grub. Let go.”
+
+“Go on up,” pursued the little fellow; “go on, man. Didn’t ye hear him
+say he was standin’ a round for everybody. Go on up.”
+
+“Let go, I tell ye. Let go. I don’t want it, I say.”
+
+But it was no use for Mulholland to refuse. The more he refused the
+more the little fellow was determined that he should be fed. Others
+joined in, eager for some amazing reason or other that Mulholland
+should be fed. It seemed that they suspected something indecent and
+improper in Mulholland’s refusal to eat.
+
+“Call out,” cried somebody, “call out for another ration. Bring it
+down to him.”
+
+“Yes, why shouldn’t he have his share as well as the next?”
+
+“Let me alone,” cried Mulholland in a rage; “let me alone, or I’ll
+smash yer skull for ye.”
+
+That put a different aspect on the question. There were a dozen angry
+oaths.
+
+“So that’s what’s the matter with ye. Yer lookin’ for fight, eh?”
+
+“Stand back an’ let me at him,” cried somebody in the rear, pressing
+forward.
+
+Mulholland tried to rush for the door, but they held on to him.
+
+“What the hell is the matter now?” thundered Gypo, striding over.
+
+Immediately the scuffling stopped. Gypo came face to face with
+Mulholland. He saw Mulholland’s little eyes, gleaming and flashing
+like the eyes of a cat beset by dogs. There was a tense moment during
+which Gypo struggled with obscure suspicions. But suddenly the
+expression on Mulholland’s face changed into an expression of cunning
+intimacy. His face instead of being fierce and resentful suddenly
+seemed to say: “We are members of the Revolutionary Organization, you
+and I. Get this rabble out of my way.” Gypo immediately remembered
+Gallagher’s promise. He looked at Mulholland with a good-natured
+condescension. “Ha,” he thought, “this fellah’ll be useful.”
+
+“Let him alone,” he cried arrogantly; “he’s a friend o’ mine. How are
+ye gettin’ on, Bartly?”
+
+Then he continued carelessly, to impress the crowd with his own
+importance and his intimacy with the affairs of the Revolutionary
+Organization, which was the most impressive thing in the lives of
+those about him.
+
+“Hear anythin’ yet about what I was tellin’ ye? I mean about the
+fellah that informed on Frankie McPhillip?”
+
+Mulholland was amazed for a moment. What audacity! But it was not
+audacity. Gypo had completely forgotten the ponderous fellow in the
+little tattered round hat who had gone into the police-station. His
+sudden conceit had completely swallowed that ponderous fellow.
+
+“He must be drunk,” thought Mulholland. He said aloud, whispering to
+Gypo, as he bent his head close and turned up his face sideways in his
+peculiar manner, “I was just passin’ an’ saw ye. I just thought I’d
+drop in an’ tell ye I’d be there at one o’clock. Ye know where I mean?
+No, we didn’t hear anythin’ yet about that.”
+
+He winked his right eye. Gypo winked his right eye and nodded
+solemnly. Then Mulholland walked quickly out the door, evidently going
+off somewhere in a hurry. But he halted at the corner of the lane,
+distended his eyes and gritted his teeth. He rubbed his chin
+meditatively, looking at the ground. He couldn’t make it out, whatever
+it was, that was troubling his mind.
+
+Gypo turned once more to the counter and continued his meal. He ate as
+if he were about to travel for days and he were deliberately devouring
+a store of food sufficient to last to the end of the journey. Behind
+him and on either side of him, they were talking about his strength
+and praising him, but he paid no heed to them. He was immersed in
+dreams about his future, now that Gallagher was going to take him back
+again into the Organization.
+
+“Aha!” cried an old woman, with watery blue eyes and a wrinkled white
+face, as she shook her fist upwards at him, “I wish I had a son like
+ye. Me own Jimmy, Lord Have Mercy on him, was killed in the big war.
+He was the boy that could bate the polis! Don’t be talkin’. I seen him
+wan night an’ it took six o’ them to pull him off a coal cart an’ he
+holdin’ on to the horse’s reins all the time with wan hand while he
+was fightin’ them with th’ other.”
+
+She stamped on the floor and yelled, her eyes gleaming ferociously, as
+if the contemplation of her dead son’s fight gave her tangible
+pleasure. Then she walked towards the door, trailing her shawl and her
+arms with bravado. The poor woman was slightly insane as the result of
+paralysis.
+
+A tall, sour-faced, lean man, with a red nose shaped like a reversed
+scimitar, who had just come in, looked after the old woman and shook
+his head. He mumbled something under his breath. The old lady halted
+and looked at him contemptuously.
+
+“What are ye sniggerin’ at,” she cried, “you with a face like a plate
+o’ burnt porridge?”
+
+There was a loud laugh.
+
+“Mary Hynes,” said the hook-nosed man, “if ye were more careful of yer
+son’s upbringin’ an’ of yer own immortal soul, ye wouldn’t be in the
+state ye are in now. Is it boastin’ of yer son’s lawlessness ye are?
+Are ye boastin’ of his livin’ crimes an’ he already gone to meet his
+God?”
+
+The hook-nosed man raised his right hand dramatically to point at the
+ceiling and he glared at the old woman with fierce and menacing
+sorrow. But his words produced a contrary effect to that which he
+expected on the old woman. She looked at him contemptuously and then
+curled her mouth up in anger.
+
+“Yerrah, d’ye call it a crime to bate a policeman?” she cried in
+amazed indignation.
+
+“Certainly it is a crime,” cried the hook-nosed man.
+
+“Damn an’ blast it, what are ye talkin’ about, Boxer Lydon?” cried a
+burly fellow coming up to Lydon and staring him excitedly and angrily
+in the face. “Didn’t ye hear of what the polis did to-day to Frankie
+McPhillip? D’ye call it a crime to bate that murderin’ lot? Aye or
+shoot them either!”
+
+“I don’t say they were justified in what they did to-day,” cried
+Lydon, raising his voice to a querulous shout in order to drown the
+uproar; “but neither will I say that the dead man was justified in
+what he done. Do none o’ ye think o’ the man McPhillip killed? Wasn’t
+he a fellow-man like yersel’? Wasn’t he an Irishman of the same flesh
+an’ blood?”
+
+“Aw! that’s nationalism,” cried somebody. “What’s an Irishman no more
+than a Turk? Ye belong to the I. R. B., an’ that’s where ye get yer
+lingo. Up the workers!”
+
+The hook-nosed man paused with his hand raised until the interrupter
+finished. Then he continued unmoved:
+
+“Do none o’ ye think that maybe that man left a mother an’ a——”
+
+But he had to stop. His voice was drowned in the uproar and the
+scuffling. The old woman began to sing “Kelly the boy from Killane,”
+as she strolled out the door. Another man was pushing his way in
+through the crowd at the door towards the hook-nosed man. This
+new-comer had been standing at the door for some time. He was dressed
+from head to foot in a heavy black overcoat. He was better dressed
+than everybody present, but he looked as pale and haggard as the
+others. His face continually twitched and his eyes were bloodshot. He
+looked at the hook-nosed man fiercely and seized him nervously by the
+buttonhole. The hook-nosed man edged away.
+
+“For God’s sake, let up on that rubbish,” cried the new-comer,
+stammering at each word. His upper lip was contorting as if he were in
+a fit.
+
+“Let me go,” cried the hook-nosed man. “I’ll have my say, an’ I won’t
+be intimidated by any Socialist agitator. Keep back from me.”
+
+“I only wanted to tell ye,” shouted the other, “I only wanted to tell
+ye . . . I say . . . I say . . .”
+
+Then nothing could be distinguished above the uproar. Everybody
+present took part in the argument. The ragged fellows who had come in
+with Gypo, curiously enough, took no interest in the argument. Those
+of them that had not already disappeared as soon as they got their
+food, now took their leave when the argument began. There was even a
+look of fear in their faces as they slunk away, as if this
+demonstration of interest in the affairs of the world terrified them,
+who had no interest in anything, since their souls were numbed by the
+hopelessness of despair. Only a few of the most wretched remained,
+crouching against the counter, in the comforting shadow of Gypo’s
+immensity. They remained because the presence of his powerful
+personality comforted them and gave them the imaginary feeling of
+having something to protect them from the menace of civilized life.
+
+Those that were now taking part in the argument were of a better
+class. They were workers of all sorts, members of trade unions and
+respectable people. They had appeared somehow, one by one but rapidly,
+in that mysterious way in which crowds of people of a certain type
+gather in the Titt Street district and carry on an argument with
+furious heat.
+
+Gypo suddenly turned around and looked at the wrangling group, at the
+open mouths, the listening ears, the distorted faces, the glittering
+eyes. He listened. He blinked. Then he laughed softly within himself.
+He felt a crazy desire to yell and fall on them with his fists. The
+mixed murmur of their agitated voices had a maddening effect on him.
+But he looked back at the counter. He still had food to eat. He
+continued his meal. The argument went on.
+
+The man with the long overcoat who had just arrived held the attention
+of the crowd. He was a well-known man in the district and all over the
+city. He owned a small tobacconist and newsvendor’s shop. He was
+called The Crank Shanahan and indeed he was a crank. He belonged to no
+organization, he went about alone, he attended every political meeting
+in the city and he was continually, in all weathers, agitating and
+preaching in a loud shrill voice his own peculiar philosophy of social
+life. That philosophy was a mixture of all sorts of political creeds,
+but its main basis was revolt against every existing institution,
+habit or belief. He was called an anarchist, but he was not an
+anarchist. He was just a fanatic who was dissatisfied with life. At
+night he was given to fearfully morbid thoughts that caused him to
+lock and bar himself in his room and sleep with the blankets right
+over his head. He was even supposed to put cotton-wool into his ears
+at night lest he might hear a sound. And once the policeman on duty
+found him wandering around the street in which he lived, at three
+o’clock in the morning, dressed in a torn nightshirt, trembling and
+gnashing his teeth with terror. He had jumped up horrified by a
+nightmare and rushed out in that state.
+
+“Listen,” he cried. “I don’t agree with the Revolutionary
+Organization, but the man that killed McPhillip . . . no . . . no,
+no . . . I mean the man . . . can’t ye let me speak? . . . I mean the
+farmer that McPhillip killed, he was an agent of the capitalist class.
+Then it follows logically that he was an enemy of the working class.
+McPhillip was an agent of the working class. He was justified in
+killing the man. That’s the matter treated logically and brought to a
+logical conclusion. Everything must be approached logically. Listen.
+Taking the question from a wider standpoint we can get a broader
+judgment that will fit all cases of the kind that may arise”—he raised
+his voice to a scream to drown the noise of a scuffle at the door—“in
+the near future. We are at the base of a world revolutionary wave.
+According as that wave advances and gathers strength the whole process
+of capitalist society will crumble up. Then there will be a gradual
+increase in the number of these skirmishes, as it were on the . . .”
+
+His voice was drowned suddenly by a big man who began to swing his
+arms about his head uttering a fearful torrent of oaths. He was drunk.
+Then Lydon shouted:
+
+“Murder is murder, I say. Murder is always murder and the gospel of
+Our Lord Jesus Christ says——”
+
+“There must be no mercy,” yelled a little man with a black moustache,
+who rushed into a corner where he had room to prance about. “There
+must be no mercy. To hell with everybody. That right, boys? Wha’?”
+
+“What are ye talkin’ about?” cried Gypo, suddenly turning about.
+
+Silence fell immediately. Everybody looked at him. His face was
+perspiring. He rubbed his hands on his chest. He curled up his lips.
+He gave his little hat a slight push towards the back of his head.
+
+Then he was seized by another fit of strange humour. He yelled once
+more and staggered towards the crowd, with his arms hanging loose,
+pretending to be dead drunk. They fell away from him in amazement. He
+stood in the middle of the room and looked about him.
+
+“What ye talkin’ about?” he drawled ponderously, swaying backwards and
+forwards.
+
+He glared from face to face, but each pair of eyes was turned away as
+he sought them. He was delighted with the terror he caused. Behind the
+counter the Italian, still smiling, had grasped a large knife and
+stood perfectly still. The girl was crouching on the floor. Then Gypo
+broke into a loud laugh, stuck his hands in his trousers pockets and
+strolled towards the door.
+
+He hesitated for a moment outside the door. Then he headed straight
+across the road. They all ran to the door to look after him. His huge
+long frame, clad in blue dungarees that clung to his thighs, shone in
+the light of the lamps as he crossed the wide road, one foot advancing
+past the other slowly, the trousers brushing with the sound of hay
+being cut with a scythe. Then the figure left the area of light and
+grew dim as he gained the pavement at the far side, and turned to the
+left under the shadow of an abrupt tall house. Then he fell away into
+the night.
+
+Presently a lean slouching figure crept across the street in pursuit.
+He also disappeared under the shadow of the abrupt house. Nobody
+noticed him. It was Mulholland tracking Gypo.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Around the corner Gypo halted. He put his hand against the wall behind
+him and stood motionless, with his head turned back, listening. He had
+heard a step following him. But the steps halted also. He listened for
+several seconds breathlessly and heard nothing further. Then he
+snorted and turned his head slowly to his front. He looked ahead into
+the darkness, dreamily. He stood perfectly still.
+
+Then his face broke slowly into a sort of smile and his eyes grew dim.
+He trembled slightly. He glanced about him sharply and furtively
+several times. There was a strange, almost mysterious “significance”
+in his movements, slight, sudden, furtive movements.
+
+Then he stared steadily down along the dark, narrow street that
+stretched ahead of him, ending at the far end in a high wall, with a
+dim lamp at one corner suggesting that another street branched off it
+to the left. He winked his right eye at the lamp and a roguish
+expression creased his face as he did so.
+
+“Why not,” he muttered aloud. “Why shouldn’t I go an’ have a bit o’
+fun? Wha’? A few bob on the women an’ a few drinks to keep me supper
+warm.”
+
+A wave of passion surged through his body. He was on the point of
+opening his mouth to utter a yell, but instead he thrust his hand into
+his trousers pocket anxiously and groped for his wad of money. He
+found it. He sighed easily.
+
+“They might have pinched it,” he muttered with a look of gravity in
+his little eyes. “That mob around there are a lot o’ wasters. Ye
+couldn’t trust yer shirt with ’em on a winter’s night. They’d take the
+charley from under a pope’s bed. Terrible lot o’ criminals around
+lately.”
+
+Then his face lit up with eagerness as his mind swerved back again to
+the contemplation of that lamp at the far end . . . and where that
+street led. He swallowed his breath with a loud noise and set out
+towards the lamp.
+
+Almost immediately a head peered around the corner behind him. The
+head watched until Gypo turned to the left at the far end past the
+lamp. Then a man darted around the corner and raced down the street in
+pursuit. It was Mulholland tracking Gypo.
+
+When Gypo turned to the left past the lamp he came into a narrow
+street in which there were no houses. On the right-hand side there was
+a high wall, like a barrack wall. It enclosed a big goods yard
+belonging to a manufactory, where mineral waters or something of that
+kind were made. On the other side of the street there was no wall at
+all. The foundations of houses still remained. Here and there, a
+doorway, a chimney stack, or the brick framework of a window, stood up
+in a ghastly fashion. Beyond that there was an open space full of
+refuse, mounds of earth, bricks, pots, old clothes. The street itself
+was a network of puddles. In order to avoid wetting himself to the
+knees, Gypo had to walk along the sloping bank of clay where the
+houses had crumbled.
+
+It was a dreary sight. It almost shouted its experiences, and if it
+had shouted, it would have talked in that endless, loud, babbling
+scream in which maniacs and demented creatures utter their words. It
+was alive in that peculiar way in which ruins are alive at night, when
+the earth is covered with darkness and the living sleep.
+
+But Gypo was not sensitive. For him, the street, with its dirt and its
+squalor, was a savage sauce to whet his appetite for the riotous feast
+of . . . He strode rapidly. He jumped from mound to mound, now
+slipping with a curse, now catching a loose brick in some piece of
+wall to steady himself. Now and again he heard a “hist” from the
+opposite wall of the street, where some woman, old and decrepit,
+sought the darkness so that her ravaged figure might escape the
+drunken eyes of some passionate fellow seeking a fool’s pleasure.
+These noises, croaks uttered by damned souls, sounds so tremendously
+horrid to the innocent mind, made no impression on Gypo. To him they
+were merely noises, expressions of everyday life.
+
+Once he recognized one of the women who took a pace forward from her
+position and put a wrinkled hand to her brow to look at him.
+
+“Ho! Blast yer sowl, Maggie Casey,” he muttered, “aren’t ye dead yet?”
+
+He chuckled with laughter as he heard her blasphemous rejoinder.
+
+As he approached the far end of the street the silence lessened. He
+heard whisperings and murmurs, snatches of distant song, sounds of
+footfalls, strains of music. These sounds acted on him like
+battle-cries. He almost broke into a run as he came gradually nearer
+to the volume of sound. At last he dashed under an old archway and he
+was in the next street. The medley of sound was all about him. On his
+left-hand side stretched the long, low streets of brothels, entwined
+like webwork among the ruins of what was once a resort of the nobility
+of eighteenth-century Dublin.
+
+He was in a narrow street of two-storied houses, low houses with green
+venetian blinds on the windows of some of them, their street doors
+opened wide, lights in all the front, ground-floor windows. But the
+street itself was in darkness on account of the drizzling rain. An odd
+woman flitted along. A few men walked about uncertainly. The street
+had a gloomy deserted look. But from the houses a medley of joyous
+sound issued.
+
+Gypo looked on for a moment excitedly. Then he walked down the street
+slowly, examining each house as he passed. He knew Katie Fox was by
+now at Biddy Burke’s. He wanted to avoid Biddy Burke’s. Biddy Burke’s
+house was over on the other side. He didn’t want to go there to-night.
+It was only a poor place, used by revolutionaries and criminals of the
+working-class type. The women there were an ugly, ill-dressed,
+whisky-drinking lot. He was well known there. He knew all the women.
+There was only Guinness’s stout on sale and even that was so diluted
+and ghastly that it was like drinking castor oil. The more a man drank
+of it the thirstier he became. A shilling a drink for poison like
+that!
+
+Yah! Away with Biddy Burke and Katie Fox and Sligo Cissie and the rest
+of them! To-night he wanted to go somewhere where he was not known. He
+wanted to go among beautiful women. Strange, beautiful women clothed
+in silk! Mad women! Women with dark, flashing eyes and sharp, white
+teeth! Huh! He wanted to go mad. It was a mad night. There was fire in
+his blood. His hands wanted to rip mountains. He would swallow
+tankards of drink. He would drain this vast reservoir of strength from
+his body. He must or he would burst. Already he felt a desire to beat
+his head against walls.
+
+For six months he had been walking about a beggar, cut off from
+pleasure, subject to Katie Fox’s charity. Phew! She was no longer
+attractive to him, that bag of bones who thought of nothing but dope.
+
+Suddenly, without thinking, breathing heavily, flushed, excited like a
+man inhaling chloroform, he staggered through a doorway. He stood in a
+long, dark hall. He could hear laughter and drunken singing coming
+from his right, a few yards down the hall, from behind a door through
+which a glint of light came. He strode to the door. He tried to lift
+the latch and walk in, but the door was bolted. Almost instantly the
+sounds ceased. He kicked at the bottom of the door with his boot
+several times.
+
+“Who’s that?” came a woman’s voice angrily.
+
+“Open the door an’ find out,” answered Gypo in a shout.
+
+“Wait a minute, Betty,” came a husky man’s voice; “lemme out.”
+
+There was shuffling and whispering.
+
+“Keep well behind it,” said somebody else.
+
+Then the bolt was withdrawn. The latch was lifted carefully. The door
+opened slowly about three inches. Gypo watched these proceedings
+nervously and angrily.
+
+“Come on, come on,” he cried at last, “what’s all this monkey trickin’
+about? Why don’t ye open the door wide and take yer mug outa the way?”
+
+The man suddenly slipped outside the door like a cat. With his back to
+the door and his right hand bulging in his coat pocket he faced Gypo.
+He was a stocky, bulgy fellow, with a criminal face. He had rushed out
+with the intention of giving Gypo a thrashing with the “blackjack”
+that was concealed on his person, but when he saw the kind of customer
+with whom he had to deal his jaw dropped. Gypo gazed at the fellow
+angrily.
+
+“So you’re the pimp,” he gurgled ferociously.
+
+He took a little hurried breath, shot out his right hand and seized
+the pimp by the throat. The pimp gasped. His right hand dropped the
+“blackjack.” He reached up with his two hands to grip the giant hand
+that held his throat.
+
+“Lemme go,” he screamed.
+
+But Gypo contemptuously hurled him away from the door and sent him
+sprawling along the hall into the darkness. Then he sent the door
+flying open with a push of his shoulder and strode blinking into the
+room.
+
+The room was crowded with people. It was very large. It had a stone
+floor and a wide, open hearth where an immense turf fire was blazing
+in a huge grate, with steaming kettles on either side, on the hobs.
+There was a dresser loaded with shining Delftware of all colours. The
+ceiling was high and white-washed. The walls were covered with
+pictures of women, in amorous postures and in the varying degrees of
+nakedness that might be expected to arouse libidinous desires in the
+minds of all types of men. Everything in the room was spotlessly
+clean, but the air was warm and heavy, due to the rather intense heat
+of the fire and the combined odour of perfume and of alcohol.
+
+This heavy, languorous odour exalted Gypo. He rolled his eyes round
+the room, drawing in a deep breath through his expanded nostrils.
+Everybody was looking at him. There were eight men present, three
+students from the University, an artist, a doctor and three young
+gentleman farmers, up from the country “on a tear.” They had hired the
+brothel for the night and ordered the proprietress to admit nobody;
+but they did not take umbrage at Gypo’s appearance. They were just at
+that moment in the delicious stage of intoxication when the most
+strange incidents become normal and welcome, to minds that are cloyed
+with alcohol fumes and the contemplation of bodily pleasures. The
+scuffle outside the door and the manner of Gypo’s entrance made no
+impression on them. His appearance, huge, towering, in a suit of
+dungarees, with his little round hat perched on his massive skull,
+intrigued them with a feeling that this was some new kind of pleasure
+provided for their entertainment. They looked at him, half laughing,
+half serious, with that dim and distant look in their eyes that comes
+with the initial stages of drunkenness.
+
+The women, on the other hand, looked at Gypo with disfavour. There
+were ten of them present. Some of them were almost nude and in various
+stages of intoxication, sitting on the men’s knees, with glasses in
+their hands and cigarettes in their mouths. Others sat solemnly on
+their chairs dressed for the street, as if they had just dropped in on
+their way somewhere. Their hard faces set in a scowl when they saw
+Gypo. He was dressed like a workman. Therefore he had no money.
+Therefore they scowled at him. This was an “upper-class” brothel. All
+the women here were “ladies.” Their “class” instincts were aroused by
+his wretched clothes and his uncouth features.
+
+One woman alone took no notice of him whatsoever. She sat in a corner,
+reading a newspaper, with her legs crossed, a cigarette between her
+lips, a fashionable short fur coat wrapped around her. Gypo’s eyes
+wandered around the room until they rested on her. There they
+remained.
+
+“What d’ye want?” cried a harsh voice behind him.
+
+Gypo turned. The proprietress of the brothel was standing beside the
+door. Her left hand was on her breast fingering a little silver
+crucifix that was suspended from her neck by a black velvet cord. Her
+right hand rested on the door, a short, white, fat hand, as if she
+were waiting until Gypo went out so as to shut the door again. She was
+a small, fat woman of middle age, with a huge head of devilishly black
+hair, arranged in towering fashion, with a glittering black comb stuck
+in the rear of the pile. Her hair was the last remains of her beauty.
+The remainder of her head had been coarsened by the odious nature of
+her pursuits. Her face was blotched, wrinkled and pale. Her eyes were
+yellow, hard, sunken and bloodshot. Her mouth was drawn together as if
+some clumsy fellow had tried to stitch the lips and made a bad job of
+it. She was dressed in a blue skirt and a white blouse. The blouse
+sleeves were rolled almost up to her shoulders showing a tremendously
+fat pair of arms. They called her Aunt Betty and she was known all
+over the district for her cunning, her meanness and the peculiar habit
+she had, perhaps in the middle of a conversation, of suddenly uttering
+a coarse expression, grasping her breasts and staring about her
+wild-eyed, as if she were afraid of some dread spectre being in
+pursuit of her.
+
+Gypo did not know her, because her place was fashionable, frequented
+only by well-to-do people, business men, army officers and students
+who had money to spend. Gypo only knew the cheaper brothels, places
+that were used as “friendly houses” by revolutionaries, criminals and
+working men. On any other night he would never think of entering the
+place, no more than a man in overalls would think of taking a seat in
+the stalls of a London theatre. But to-night he had transcended
+himself. He looked at Aunt Betty arrogantly with his lower lip
+hanging.
+
+“I want a drink,” he replied gruffly, in a low voice. Then he added
+after a pause with a sudden hoarse chuckle, “an’ anythin’ else that’s
+goin’.”
+
+“Ye can’t get a drink here,” said Aunt Betty. “You better be going
+somewhere else. You’re wasting your time here, my good man.”
+
+Aunt Betty spoke in a state of great excitement. This was habitual
+with her, owing to the terrific strain it caused her to try to effect
+the correct pronunciation of her words and “the educated accent of a
+woman of good family.” For she always tried to speak like a lady.
+
+Gypo took no notice of her, or of the pimp who had again entered the
+room and now stood against the wall, with his terror-stricken eyes
+gleaming and his face livid with malice.
+
+“Here,” he cried, “give everybody a drink. I’m callin’ a drink for the
+house.”
+
+He thrust his hand into his pocket, pulled out the roll of notes and
+separated one, which he held out to Aunt Betty. It was like the
+performance of a miracle. Aunt Betty’s eyes sparkled. She advanced
+almost unconsciously, laughing with her thin, hard lips, while her
+eyes gleamed with avarice. Her fingers almost trembled as she took the
+note slowly. Feverishly, she examined it under the light. Gypo laughed
+as she did so and gave her a loud, hearty smack on the back, with
+horrid familiarity. She merely nudged him playfully in response. The
+note was genuine and had passed her scrutiny. She sighed and cracked
+her fingers towards the pimp.
+
+“Glasses all round,” she said.
+
+There was a little thrill of applause from the throats of the women as
+soon as they saw that his money was genuine. Some of those who were
+sitting alone, dressed for the street, got up and approached him,
+uttering laughing endearments. Even the women who were already
+engaged, sitting on the knees of the men, slightly tipsy, sobered up
+and became contemplative and sulkily jealous of those women who were
+free to capture Gypo and his wad of Treasury notes.
+
+The men, on the other hand, now regarded him with hostility, jealous
+of the attraction he held for the women.
+
+Only one person in the room took absolutely no notice of the whole
+proceedings. That was the woman in the fur coat, who sat in the corner
+to the right of the fire, reading the newspaper.
+
+And Gypo, disregarding the soft, naked arms that attempted to embrace
+him and the amorous, sensuous faces, that were turned up to his on all
+sides and the soft, seductive, sibilant whispers that were uttered at
+him, kept his eyes towards the indifferent woman in the corner
+fixedly.
+
+“Keep out of me way,” he muttered.
+
+He pushed the girls away from him, strode over to the corner and stood
+beside the mysterious one. He stood over her, breathing heavily,
+looking down at her. She glanced at his knees from under her eyelids.
+Then she puffed at her cigarette, flicked something off her sleeve
+with her thumb and forefinger and went on reading her newspaper. The
+other women looked on silently with narrowed eyes. The men began to
+smile. Everybody was interested in what the fur-coated woman would do.
+
+Gypo sat down beside her. He sat on the floor with his back to the
+wall.
+
+“Aren’t ye hot wearin’ that fur coat?” he said.
+
+She did not reply. There was a titter from the women.
+
+“What’s all the news in the paper about?” continued Gypo.
+
+The woman did not reply. One of the men burst into laughter, making a
+sound like an explosion, as if his mouth had been full of laughter a
+long time and it suddenly burst out.
+
+“Horrid man! Go ’way,” said somebody else, mimicking the voice of a
+timid and refined woman.
+
+Gypo’s face darkened and his throat veins swelled ominously. But just
+then the drinks arrived. He jumped to his feet and rushed over to the
+pimp who was carrying them. He drained one glass of whisky, then
+another, then another. An outcry arose.
+
+“Hey, don’t drink the lot.”
+
+“Savage.”
+
+“What d’ye mean by callin’ a drink for us an’ then swallowin’ ’em all
+yoursel’?”
+
+“Hey! Stop him, Johnny. Take the tray away from him.”
+
+“You all go to the divil,” gasped Gypo. The whisky rushing down his
+throat had taken his breath away. “Wait there. There’s lots more.”
+
+He pulled out another pound note and tossed it to Aunt Betty
+carelessly.
+
+“There ye are,” he cried, “go an’ get more drinks.”
+
+Then amid the delighted yells of the girls he drained three more
+glasses one after the other, each one at a gulp, while the women
+danced around him.
+
+Suddenly the whole company went into a state of mad excitement. Human
+beings always respond in that way to the mysterious influence of a
+fresh and dominant personality, who, with a word, a gesture, a shout,
+turns a solemn and bored gathering into an almost Bacchanalian party.
+It seemed that all the people in the room had only awaited the arrival
+of Gypo to abandon themselves completely to an orgy of mad behaviour.
+Shouts, shrieks, smacking kisses, laughter, mingled chaotically in the
+warm air of the room. Each of the men vied with his neighbours in an
+exaggerated attempt to make a fool of himself. A young man with an
+innocent, red face and beautiful grey eyes, a student, stood up
+precariously in front of the fire, laughing incontinently and began to
+strip himself naked. Another man, a big fellow, seized a girl in his
+arms, tumbled with her to the floor and lay there shouting and trying
+to kiss her, while she struggled to free her loosened hair from
+beneath his shoulder. Gypo picked up two women and perched them one on
+each shoulder. Then he seized two others round the waist, raised them
+from the ground under his arms and began to jump into the air, yelling
+like a bull with each jump, while his fluttering, half-naked cargo of
+women laughed hysterically as they dangled about him.
+
+This amazing scene lasted fully a quarter of an hour and then ended
+suddenly. Everybody seemed to be exhausted. It was only then that Aunt
+Betty’s voice was heard above the uproar.
+
+“Do ye want to get me run in be the police?” she cried.
+
+“It’s all right, mother,” said Gypo, going up to her and putting his
+arm around her waist. “Yer a nice girl. I’ll keep order here for ye.
+Now who is kickin’ up a row? The next fellah that speaks above a
+whisper I’ll open his skull for him.”
+
+“Would you, though?” cried the young man who was stripping himself
+naked. He stood in front of the fire in his trousers and underwear
+with his shirt in his hand. “I’ll teach you manners, my good fellow,”
+he continued, pulling up his trousers and brandishing his shirt. “Come
+on. I’ll teach you how to behave yourself in the presence of
+gentlemen.”
+
+But somebody pulled him on to a settee before he could do anything.
+Gypo looked at him for a moment and then he laughed. His eyes were
+gleaming. The quantity of whisky he had drunk was coursing through his
+head and his limbs as if it were being pumped methodically by a
+machine. He released Aunt Betty and took a pace towards the centre of
+the floor. Then he shivered all over and gasped for breath. He broke
+into a laugh. He walked over to the fur-coated woman without looking
+in her direction. He stooped down, put his arms about her, lifted her
+up until her face was level with his and he kissed her. His clumsy
+lips met her right cheek. They groped about for her mouth, but they
+could not reach it on account of her frantic efforts to free herself.
+He lost his balance and let her down to the floor. He regained his
+balance, laughing heavily and wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
+
+There was an intense silence. The woman stood in front of him erect
+and trembling. She held her hands rigid by her sides, with the long,
+slender fingers bent backwards. She was dressed in excellent taste,
+black shoes, navy-blue skirt, short fur coat, small, black hat, from
+under whose brim brown curls protruded. She was a handsome woman, a
+beautiful woman, but for her face. The left side of her face was
+disfigured in a ghastly way from the temple to the jaw. So that one
+cheek was white and the other almost black. The left eye was darkened
+and almost sightless, while the right eye was blue, clear and gleaming
+with anger. The disfigurement touched the corner of her mouth. The
+remainder of the mouth was red-lipped, arched and beautiful.
+
+Suddenly, she bared her white teeth and spat at Gypo with the ferocity
+of a wild animal.
+
+He shivered. His hands clawed up. His face contorted and he swivelled
+his head on his neck from left to right and back again, like a ram
+that is going to charge an enemy. A woman near the fire gasped with
+horror. But Gypo did not attack. Instead of advancing on the woman he
+took a pace to his rear and let his breath out through his nostrils
+with a great noise. Then he stood motionless, with his eyes distended,
+staring at the infuriated woman in awe and wonder. She was staring at
+him with her eyes almost closed.
+
+“You pig,” she gasped.
+
+There was a painful silence. Each person in the room felt sure that a
+catastrophe was imminent. The fact that the room, a few minutes
+before, had been full of the sound of libidinous revelry made the
+silence all the more terrible. Everybody watched Gypo. His huge body,
+monstrous with strange movement, stood under the glare of the lamp
+that hung from the ceiling. His face, staring steadily at the woman,
+changed again and again, in response to the dark and mysterious
+suggestions that chased one another through his mind. At one moment
+his chest would heave and his limbs would stiffen. Then his breath
+would come out with a snap. His jaws would set. His eyes would expand.
+A movement would begin in his throat. Then a sound like a curtailed
+snort would come from his nostrils.
+
+At last, after waiting for twenty seconds, the spectators were
+startled by the unexpected outcome of these movements. Gypo broke into
+a roar of laughter. He raised his head and laughed at the ceiling.
+Everybody gaped at him in fright. All gaped at him, terrified, except
+the woman. As if in response to his laughter, laughter broke from her
+lips too, but it was the shrill, thin laughter of hysteria, that made
+her eyes glitter coldly.
+
+Breaking off in the middle of his laugh, Gypo strode over to Aunt
+Betty. He took her by the arm, pointed his finger at the woman in the
+fur coat and whispered hoarsely:
+
+“I want her. Get me a room. I want to take her upstairs. Ye can have
+whatever money ye ask.”
+
+“Never,” shrieked the woman in the fur coat.
+
+She put her hands to her face. Then she took a tiny step forward with
+her right foot and stood leaning on the foot, trembling as if she had
+planted it on ice.
+
+“None of this nonsense, Phyllis,” said Aunt Betty, coming forward to
+the centre of the room. She faced the fur-coated woman with her arms
+akimbo and her jaws squared. “I’m fed up with your swagger. You’re no
+better than yer board and lodging, an’ as long as I keep you, you’re
+no better than any other woman that takes bite and sup in my house.
+Put that in your pipe and smoke it. One man is as good as another.
+You’re going with him.”
+
+“That’s true, Aunt Betty,” cried several women, looking with hatred at
+the fur-coated woman.
+
+“Rabble,” shrieked the fur-coated woman, stamping her feet and shaking
+her fists all round her at the women. “What filthy souls you have to
+be reduced to this level. I’m not a prostitute like you and that’s why
+you hate me. You hate me because I’m an educated woman and——”
+
+“It’s nothin’ o’ the kind,” cried a big, large-boned, red-faced,
+strong, handsome woman, called Connemara Maggie. “We hate ye because
+yer a stuck-up, ignorant thing, that thinks she’s better than what God
+turned her into; an’ God forgive me for sayin’ so——”
+
+“More power to ye, Maggie,” interrupted several, “tell her yer mind.”
+
+“I don’t mind what you say, Connemara Maggie,” gasped the fur-coated
+one. “You’re not the worst of them and——”
+
+“Good God,” shouted Aunt Betty, suddenly putting her hands to her
+breasts.
+
+She backed to the wall, staring furtively at the fur-coated woman. She
+was in the power of one of her “visions.” Gypo stared at the woman in
+the fur coat with his arms hanging loosely by his sides.
+
+“Listen,” continued the woman, “I don’t bear any of you any malice.
+You can’t help it, any of you. I don’t bear even you any malice, Aunt
+Betty. I know very well that were it not for you I would starve
+or . . . or be in a worse place. I have been in your house a month now
+and you’ve been kind to me. I know very well nobody can help anything.
+I’m English, an army officer’s wife, so it’s only natural that you
+girls would be prejudiced against me——”
+
+“It’s nothing o’ the kind,” cried Connemara Maggie; “it’s yer stuck-up
+ways that——”
+
+“Let her have her say, Maggie,” cried another.
+
+“I had no right to come in here,” cried the woman, bursting into
+tears. “I should have gone to the police and got them——”
+
+“The police!” yelled Gypo suddenly, starting as if he had been
+awakened from his sleep. “None o’ that talk. Keep away from the
+police. What d’ye want the police for?”
+
+“I want to get back home,” sobbed the woman.
+
+“Where’s yer home?”
+
+“It’s . . . it’s near London.”
+
+“Well, what are ye doin’ over here then?”
+
+“I got this,” cried the woman, becoming hysterical again. She put a
+trembling hand to her disfigured cheek. “I got this a year ago. It’s
+driven me mad. My husband took another woman. I sold everything I had
+and came over to Dublin. I wanted to go to work. Honest to God, I did.
+But I could get nothing. Then a man brought me down here. Good God,
+the shame of telling you all this in a place like this . . .
+the . . .”
+
+“D’ye want to go home now?” cried Gypo angrily.
+
+She did not reply, but looked at him with large eyes, as if in
+amazement.
+
+“What’ll bring ye home?” he continued. “How much will it cost?”
+
+“A little over two pounds,” she replied in a low voice.
+
+“Here,” he cried, taking out his money, “here’s yer fare. One, two,
+three,” he paused and was going to add a fourth, but he put it back.
+He handed her the three notes. She shrank backwards, looking at the
+money with large eyes.
+
+“Don’t be afraid,” he said in a strange, dreamy voice. “Take the money
+an’ get outa here. That’s enough to take ye home. Go back home. Yer
+not wanted here. You an’ yer husband and the police. Ye better keep
+away from the police, I’m tellin’ ye. Go on. Beat it. Get outa here.”
+
+Staring him in the face, trembling, with her mouth open, she seized
+the notes suddenly. Then uttering an exclamation, she looked about her
+once and rushed to the door.
+
+“Go off now,” cried Gypo after her. “Go off now.”
+
+Everybody stared at the door through which she disappeared, banging it
+after her. There was silence. Then Aunt Betty spoke:
+
+“That’s all very well,” she sniggered; “but she owes me two pound ten.
+Who’s goin’ to pay me that? It’s all very well doin’ the——”
+
+“Shut up yer gob,” cried Gypo, “here’s two pound for ye. That’s
+enough. Not another word outa ye.” He threw two pound notes at her.
+Then he threw out his arms. “Who’s comin’ to bed with me,” he cried,
+“before the bank is broke?”
+
+“I am, me bould son o’ gosha,” cried Connemara Maggie, rushing to him,
+with her yellow curly hair streaming about her face and her blue eyes
+dancing.
+
+She enveloped his neck with her brawny arms.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+At fifteen minutes to one, Bartly Mulholland entered Biddy Burke’s
+kitchen and sat by the fire. Nobody addressed him. He saluted nobody.
+Biddy Burke was sitting on the other side of the fire, on a stool,
+smoking a cigarette.
+
+Biddy Burke was a middle-aged woman with a lowering expression in her
+black eyes, with puffed-out, sallow cheeks and a swollen throat. She
+was of the type of Irishwoman that is prone to sudden passions, due to
+the habit of eating enormous meals and then suffering from digestive
+disorders. They are tender-hearted people, utterly lacking in an
+æsthetic sense, violent, quarrelsome, savage, generous, inconsistent.
+Biddy was dressed in a white blouse and a blue skirt. She wore her
+greyish hair drawn back to her poll tightly and parted in the middle
+according to the peasant fashion.
+
+There were other people in the room, two young women who sat on chairs
+and Jimmy “the fancy man,” who lay on his right side, on the settle
+opposite the fire.
+
+Mulholland looked around the room slowly. Then he spoke.
+
+“Was Gypo Nolan here this evenin’, Mrs. Burke?” he said.
+
+Biddy Burke slowly shook her head, carefully examining Mulholland’s
+face as she did so. Then, as if she suddenly remembered something
+important, she leaned forward and bunched her lips together.
+
+“There hasn’t a man stood within me door this blessed night,” she said
+in her rough, croaky voice. “No, nor damn the bottle o’ stout did I
+sell. That’s the God’s truth. Some people find Biddy Burke all right
+when they’re in trouble an’ they got nothin’, but when their tune
+changes they give her a wide berth. I’ll soon be in the workhouse at
+the rate things are goin’. I never saw anythin’ like it. The country
+is goin’ to the wall. That’s all there’s to it. I knew they’d make a
+mess of it with their revolutions an’ their shootin’ the peelers. Not
+that I didn’t do me bit to help the boys, God bless ’em, but ’tisn’t
+the boys that done the fightin’ that get the jobs. So it isn’t. It
+never is, if ye ask Biddy Burke. It’s them publicans an’ bishops that
+were always top dog in this country. ’Twas that way before an’ ’tis
+that way now an’ ’twill be that way when Biddy Burke is goin’ to meet
+her God on the day of judgment. They were talkin’ about English
+tyrants, but sure nobody ever saw the likes o’ these tyrants with
+their searches an’ their raids, an’ every divil’s wart of a farmer’s
+son that can pull on his breeches without his mother’s help, runnin’
+around an’ callin’ himself a gineral. Aw! Gypo Nolan! He’s like the
+rest o’ them, Bartly Mulholland. You take it from Biddy. Indeed then,
+he hasn’t set a foot within me door. It’s not that I haven’t heard of
+his goin’s on though. Huh!”
+
+“What did ye hear about him?” asked Mulholland, peering at her.
+
+“What did I hear about him?” cried Biddy Burke. “What d’ye take me
+for, Bartly Mulholland? An information bureau or what? Don’t be
+botherin’ me.”
+
+Mulholland sighed. Then he took out his pipe and lit it. He put his
+back against the wall and began to smoke in apparent comfort. There
+was silence. Through the open street door sounds of footsteps and of
+voices came in through the rain now and again. They were subdued
+sounds. It seemed that everything was waiting for something monstrous
+to happen.
+
+The two young women began in their gruff, cracked voices to discuss
+the death of Francis Joseph McPhillip. They talked casually, in
+whispers, indifferently.
+
+Mulholland peered at them for a moment. Then he sank back into his
+thoughts. His thoughts just then were not at all comfortable. He had
+lost track of Gypo. He had been wandering about trying to find his
+quarry again, absolutely without success. Gypo had been swallowed up.
+A more nervous man than Mulholland would have not taken the matter so
+philosophically, so coolly. Because if Gypo could not be found again,
+Mulholland’s own life would be in serious danger. But Mulholland was
+not considering that aspect of the affair. Mulholland was a sincere
+revolutionist. It was the danger to the “cause” that worried him. The
+“cause” was his whole existence. He did not understand any other
+purpose in life except the achievement of an Irish Workers’ Republic.
+
+Still . . . as he sat on the stool, stoically smoking his pipe, other
+worries came into his mind. If he could not find Gypo and anything
+serious happened to himself as a result, what would become of his wife
+and his six young children? He hardly ever thought of them seriously,
+in this way, with a view to the future. The future held a workers’
+republic, somewhere in the distance, when there would be no slums, no
+hunger, no sick wives, no children that got the mumps and the rickets
+and the German measles and the whooping-cough with devilish
+regularity. It never worried him to think that his wife and his six
+children were for the moment living in a miserable slum shanty, with
+his wife going rapidly into a decline through hard work. That had to
+be. The “cause” was above all these things. Why! It was his wife who
+often urged him on to give all his time to the “cause” whenever he
+became slightly despondent or disheartened, timorous or apathetic.
+
+Ever struggling without reward!
+
+So he thought suddenly. But almost as soon as the thought entered his
+brain another thought came in mad, bloodshot pursuit. He pulled
+savagely at his pipe and ejected the first thought in terror.
+
+Even “mentally” it was dangerous to think of leaving the Organization
+without being expelled. After all . . . terror was the foundation of
+his zeal.
+
+He forced himself into his habitual calm. His face assumed the
+impenetrable aspect which he had developed during five years of
+constant practice. He turned to Biddy Burke again.
+
+“Where did ye say ye saw Gypo carrying on?” he said casually.
+
+Biddy Burke looked at him ferociously, emitting two columns of
+cigarette smoke through her fat nostrils.
+
+“I didn’t say I saw him carryin’ on anywhere, Bartly Mulholland,” she
+said angrily. “Be the holy! These late years every one o’ ye is as
+smart as a corporation lawyer. Now look here, Bartly. I don’t want to
+have any truck atall with ye or yer crowd. Ye know that too. I know
+ye, me fine bucko, an’ I don’t think . . . eh . . . well o’ course,
+Bartly . . . ye know what I mane. . . . It’s not . . . uh . . . that I
+mane any harm . . . but a poor woman like mesel’ . . . o’ course I’m
+ready as I said before to do me duty for me fellow-men . . . but it’s
+like this . . . what does a woman like me gain be gettin’ mixed up in
+politics . . . that is o’ course . . . look here,” she continued in a
+lower voice, “I heard he was up in Aunt Betty’s, raisin’ hell up
+there. He was one o’ your crowd, wasn’t he?”
+
+Mulholland looked at her sombrely. She drew back immediately.
+
+“Well, ye know me well, Bartly,” she muttered apologetically and
+nervously. “I’m not sayin’ anythin’ out o’ place. Am I, girls? Sure——”
+
+Just then an interruption came from outside. Footsteps came rushing to
+the door. Then gasps were heard. Then a panting sound became audible.
+Then Katie Fox burst into the room, with her right hand on her hip,
+her eyes glittering, looking about her wildly. She rushed up to Biddy
+Burke. She bent down from the hips towards her and began to speak
+immediately, gasping after each word.
+
+“What d’ye think of it, Biddy?” she cried. “D’ye know where I found
+him? D’ye know where I found him? The big hulkin’ waster! An’ she
+that’s not fit to walk the same street as me with her big, ugly arms
+around his neck! She laughed in me face. She laughed”—screaming—“in me
+face! I wish to God I had hit her with the bottle I threw. That ud
+spoil her mug. Though it was spoiled enough the day she was born. Who
+was she, may I ask? Who was she, Biddy Burke? I’m askin’ ye. Ye don’t
+know an’ ye’d never guess in a thousand years. Who would she be but me
+bould Connemara Maggie! That imperent trapster that came up here last
+year as a skivvy in a Gaelic Leaguer’s house, one o’ them crazy
+fellahs that goes around in kilts. She came up here an’ before she was
+three months in town she was put in the family way be a soldier. Then
+she comes down here, with her curly locks an’ her big face like a
+heifer, savin’ the comparison. I pushed up past Aunt Betty in the hall
+an’ she shoutin’ after me. I bust into the room an’ there he was,
+sittin’ on the floor, with his legs spread out, drinkin’ outa the neck
+of a bottle, laughin’ like a fool, with her sittin’ beside him.
+‘Hello, Katie,’ says he, ‘d’ye want a drink?’ ‘’Twill do ye good,’
+says she with a giggle. Me curse on her! I gave him a bit o’ me mind
+an’ . . . Biddy, for God’s sake, gimme a drink o’ water. Biddy,
+listen.”
+
+She threw herself suddenly at Biddy’s feet and began to moan. But
+almost immediately she jumped to her feet again and cried out:
+
+“An’ what’s more he gave three quid to that swank of an Englishwoman.
+He gave her three quid and he paid two quid more to Aunt Betty, money
+that was owin’ to her for board, an’ he never gave me a penny. Me that
+kept him for the last six months when I hadn’t a bite mesel’. But I’ll
+tell everybody. I’ll tell.”
+
+She looked around her wildly. She saw Mulholland. She came up to him
+and bent down close to his face. Her hat trailed off. Her hair fell
+down over her eyes. She swayed. She pointed her right forefinger
+menacingly at Mulholland’s forehead.
+
+“Listen to me, Bartly,” she said. “You remember me when I was a good
+girl an’ when I was a member o’ . . . ye know yersel’ . . . Well, so
+was he, wasn’t he? Well, can ye tell me how did Frankie McPhillip get
+plugged? Who got the twenty quid that the Farmers’ Union gave out?
+Where did he get the money? I’m not shoutin’ any names. No names, no
+pack drills. But ye can guess for yersel’. Where did he get his money
+from? Was it be robbin’ a sailor at the back o’ Cassidy’s same as he
+told me in the pub? Was it?” She suddenly threw her hands over her
+head and clawed the air, shrieking. They jumped up and caught her.
+
+Mulholland got to his feet quietly. He stole out into the street,
+avoiding the people who came rushing up to Biddy Burke’s door,
+attracted by the screaming.
+
+Mulholland chuckled as he crossed the street. He would have plenty of
+news for Gallagher. After this there would be little difficulty in his
+getting McPhillip’s job on the Head-quarters Staff. He stole quietly
+into the hallway of Aunt Betty’s house. He went noiselessly up the
+stairs without attracting the attention of the revellers who were
+still “on the tear.” He reached the landing. There were three doors,
+with light streaming through each of them. He listened at each door.
+The third was the right one. He stood straight. He lifted the latch
+suddenly and strode into the room. He called out as he did so
+dramatically:
+
+“Come on, Gypo, it’s time for ye to be comin’ with me.”
+
+For a moment he could see nobody, owing to his excitement and the
+thick mist of smoke and unescaped vapours which filled the room. He
+stood within the door with his feet spread out wide on the bare
+moth-eaten boards of the floor, with his right hand in his pocket
+fingering his revolver. His heart was beating wildly. Then he became
+aware of Gypo’s presence. He felt that peculiar movement in his head
+that the realization of Gypo’s presence always caused, a little
+snapping movement of unreasoning terror. Then he heard Gypo’s voice,
+heavy and hoarse with drunkenness, but cordial and friendly and
+distinctly patronizing.
+
+“Hello, Bartly. Sit down an’ have a drink. Plenty time yet.”
+
+Then he turned his head towards the fireplace and saw Gypo.
+
+Gypo was sitting on the floor to the right of the fire, in a corner,
+in half-darkness, bare to the waist, with his trousered legs stretched
+out at a wide angle, sitting bolt upright, a bottle gripped in his
+right hand between his knees, his feet bare.
+
+Connemara Maggie was standing by the fire drying Gypo’s shirt, his
+jacket and his socks. The big boots were resting on a fender before
+the fire, steaming. She took no notice of Mulholland’s entrance. With
+her golden hair hanging in disorder over her face, with her blouse
+undone, with her strong, heavy-boned face covered with perspiration,
+with her great, soft eyes swollen and gentle like the eyes of a
+heifer, she busied herself tending her man, just as if she had never
+left the purity of her Connemara hills and she were tending her
+peasant spouse after a hard day’s work in the fields; instead of
+tending a casual lover in the sordid environment of a brothel. There
+was no hint of vice or of libidinous pleasure in her face or in her
+movements. She seemed to be, like Gypo himself, a child of the earth,
+unconscious of the artificial sins that are the handiwork of the city.
+In her two brawny arms she held the steaming shirt to the blaze. She
+stood silent and immovable.
+
+There was little else in the small, whitewashed, low-ceilinged room. A
+bed with the clothes tousled on it, a quilt that lay on the floor by
+the bed, a chair on three legs and a weatherbeaten washstand,
+containing a basin and a broken jug, comprised the furniture.
+
+Mulholland looked around at all this before he spoke. It was as well
+to get the correct details in case identification were necessary. Gypo
+might deny it. Then he spoke. He had recovered his nerve.
+
+“No,” he said. “I don’t want a drink. It’s time for ye to be comin’.”
+
+“Be off with ye, ye little divil,” yelled Gypo, suddenly jumping to
+his feet, with a great scraping and slapping noise. “Who are ye givin’
+orders to?”
+
+He took a pace forward and reached out his right hand, but Mulholland
+had drawn his revolver and taken a pace to his rear. At the same time
+he called out in a hissing whisper:
+
+“It’s not me orders. It’s the Commandant’s orders, an’ ye better be
+careful about disobeyin’ them.”
+
+Immediately Gypo drew himself up and let his hands drop to his sides.
+His face, which had lit up with anger, dropped into that peculiar
+wondering expression, which he wore when he was musing on the river
+bank before he went into the police-station. He looked at Mulholland
+in amazement. His forehead wrinkled. His nostrils expanded and
+contracted. His thick lips moved backwards and forwards, up and down.
+His face and his cropped skull shone in the light of the paraffin lamp
+that rested on the mantelpiece over the fire. The light also shone
+across his body, over a bulging bare shoulder that stood out white and
+massive and round below his brown neck. The shoulder muscles were
+immense. His body was white and hairless. His skin was perfectly
+smooth. But everywhere the muscles strained against the skin, in
+irregular, moving mounds. They swelled out on his breasts, at his
+biceps, above his hips, on his shoulders, just as if his head and neck
+were a massive tree growth and the body muscles were its roots, sunk
+into the body promiscuously and afar, during centuries of life.
+
+He looked at Mulholland for some seconds. Then he turned to Maggie.
+
+“Gimme me clothes, Maggie,” he said quietly.
+
+She handed them to him in silence. He dressed. He put on his little
+tattered round hat. Then he put his hand in his trousers pocket. He
+took out all the money he had left. Two pounds four and sixpence. He
+put the four and sixpence back into his pocket. He handed the two
+pound notes to Maggie.
+
+“Keep one an’ give the other to Katie Fox,” he said. “Ye’ll find her
+down at Biddy Burke’s.”
+
+She nodded and put the notes within her blouse.
+
+“So long, Maggie. See you again,” he said, going to the door.
+
+“So long,” she called after him quietly.
+
+Gypo stalked out unsteadily, followed by Mulholland.
+
+After a little while Connemara Maggie also left the room. She went
+down to Biddy Burke’s.
+
+Biddy Burke’s was now thronged with people. They were mostly women of
+the district and their men. They had been talking at a terrific rate
+when Maggie came in, but a strange silence fell upon them when she
+appeared. She did not take any notice of them. Going up to Katie Fox,
+who sat by the hearth, on the seat occupied recently by Mulholland,
+she took out the pound note and offered it to her.
+
+“Gypo Nolan gave me this for ye,” she said quietly.
+
+Katie Fox looked at the note. Then she looked at Maggie. Her under lip
+was quivering. Her eyes opened and narrowed spasmodically. She was
+moved by some complex emotion that she could not master for the
+moment. She did not speak. Others began to whisper. Some spoke out
+loud and sharply:
+
+“Don’t take it, Katie. It’s blood money,” said one.
+
+“Take it,” said Biddy Burke indignantly. “A pound note doesn’t smell
+when it’s changed.”
+
+“Money is the common whore of all humanity,” stuttered a tall, lean,
+drunken gentleman, who dozed by the window with his head dangling.
+
+“I bet she got more than that to give ye,” said another woman.
+
+“Yes, I bet she has,” cried Katie Fox, suddenly settling the matter
+that was agitating her mind, whatever it was. “I know her. Out with
+it, Connemara Maggie,” she screamed, jumping to her feet and squaring
+herself. “Out with it an’ don’t stand there tryin’ to melt butter in
+me mouth with yer soft looks. How much did he give ye for me? Don’t
+tell me he only gave me one quid. Yer a liar before ye open yer mouth
+to say so. Ye——”
+
+“Well of all the stories—” cried Connemara Maggie in amazement.
+
+“Don’t put on airs, Maggie,” said a woman beside her. “Don’t put on
+airs.”
+
+“Out with the rest o’ the money,” cried Katie Fox.
+
+“Yer a pack o’ dogs,” cried Connemara Maggie furiously. “Yer a pack
+o’——”
+
+She gasped and could say no more, astounded and hurt bitterly by the
+slanderous attack from Katie Fox, to whom she had never spoken in her
+life before, except to say good morning. She fumbled at her blouse and
+took out the other pound note that Gypo had given her for herself.
+Then she took a purse from a hiding-place on her left thigh. She
+abstracted another note from that. She put back the purse again. She
+threw the three notes at Katie Fox.
+
+“There ye . . .” she hissed. “That’s all his money. Take it. Maybe
+it’s dirty like yersel’. I am well rid of ye. If he’s yer man, keep
+him.”
+
+She spat and strode out of the room, swinging her arms and knocking
+out of her way all who came in front of her.
+
+Some stared after her and swore. Others looked at Katie Fox. Katie had
+the three pound notes in her hands and her lips were moving. Then
+Biddy Burke whispered something to her. Immediately Katie sighed and
+clutched the three notes in her hand, desperately, staring at the
+floor. Then she held them out to Biddy Burke rapidly, without looking
+in their direction. They lay crumpled in a ball on her quivering thin
+palm.
+
+“Take them, Biddy,” she whispered. Then she suddenly raised her voice
+to an hysterical shriek. “Take them, but for God’s sake hurry and give
+me something at once. Quick, quick. Give it to me, Biddy. Give it to
+me.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+In the Bogey Hole rats scurried about, careless of the sentry who
+tramped up and down, from end to end of the long stone passage, with
+his rubber-heeled boots sounding loudly in the cavernous silence.
+Drops of water gathered slowly on the stone ceilings and then fell
+with soft, empty splashes to the stone floors. Except for the
+scurrying of the rats, the falling of the water and the footfalls of
+the sentry, there was silence.
+
+The Bogey Hole, in which the Revolutionary Organization were about to
+hold their inquiry into the cause of the death of Francis Joseph
+McPhillip, had once been the wine cellars of a nobleman. Above it the
+ruins of the house still remained. But everybody had long since
+forgotten the name of the owner in the district. The hallway of the
+house was choked with rubbish. The two top stories had fallen in. Only
+a few rooms remained in a crumbling state. Children played in them and
+parties of men played cards for money there on Sundays. That’s all.
+But the wine cellars underneath were often used by the Revolutionary
+Organization as a meeting-place and for other purposes.
+
+A wide stone stairway led down into the cellars from the rear of the
+hallway. There was a wide passage running straight through the cellars
+and rooms opened off the passage on either side. In the first room to
+the left of the stairway six men stood about. They were the guard,
+seven men including the man who was on sentry. They stood about the
+room, or sat on the floor by the wall, with their revolvers strapped
+outside their raincoats. A lighted lantern was placed on the floor in
+the centre of the room. The faces that were touched by the lantern
+light were haggard and pale. Farther down on the same side of the
+passage, a larger room was prepared for the inquiry. A small table had
+been placed in it. A horse blanket covered the table. There were
+several small forms there and a little “bedside table” to the right of
+the main table, with a deck chair behind it. A big lamp, turned on
+full, hung from the ceiling. It lit up the room so that the dampness
+on the walls glittered. Two, tall, lean men stood by the entrance to
+the room, one on either side of it.
+
+Across the passage, still farther away from the stairway, the Rat
+Mulligan was sitting on a form in another room. His three guards sat
+opposite him on a form. They had their revolvers in their hands.
+
+All along the passage the light of the big lamp penetrated. It reached
+up three of the steps of the stairway. Beyond that and about the roof
+of the passage, there was pitch darkness.
+
+At the far end of the passage the outlines of a door could be seen. It
+was a heavy oaken door, very old. Formerly it was the door of an
+airtight room where special wines were kept. These wines were let down
+into the room from the garden. A trap-door opened off the garden into
+the room. The barrels were let down through this trap-door. Now,
+however, the room was used by the Revolutionary Organization for
+prisoners. A square hole had been made in the upper part of the door
+to let in air, so that the prisoners would not suffocate.
+
+It was three minutes past one. Three men, dressed in long raincoats
+and soft hats, with masks over their eyes, came down the stone
+stairway. They were immediately challenged by the sentry. One of them
+mumbled a word casually. The sentry saluted. They walked quickly down
+the passage and entered the inquiry room. The sentries at the door
+stood to attention as they entered. They sat down. One of them, he who
+sat in the middle, threw an attaché case on the table and yawned. They
+all lit cigarettes and began to talk in whispers, with bored, sleepy
+voices, hardly opening their lips. They were the three members of the
+Central Executive Committee who had been appointed as judges for the
+inquiry.
+
+At twenty minutes past one Commandant Dan Gallagher came down the
+stairs with Mary McPhillip. She wore a dark woolen overcoat buttoned
+to the throat and belted at the waist. Gallagher was dressed as
+before. She looked around her in a frightened manner. Gallagher had to
+urge her along with his right hand that held her arm. When the sentry
+uttered his challenge she stopped dead, gasped, and put her hands to
+her lips. Gallagher began to whisper to reassure her. Trembling and
+clutching at his arm, she was led by him into the inquiry room. He put
+her sitting on a form and went over to talk to the members of the
+Executive Committee, who had not got to their feet or taken any notice
+whatsoever.
+
+At twenty-five minutes past one, a hoarse voice was heard at the top
+of the stairs, yelling the words of a ribald song, while another
+voice, a hushed one, angrily expostulated. Then there was a savage
+grunt, an oath, the sound of a heavy body crashing into something that
+broke with a brittle crack and then Gypo came down the stairs. He came
+down, slipping on his back, with his arms and legs stretched out,
+groping at the air. He landed at the bottom with a thud. He sat up
+stiffly. Then he broke out into an amazing peal of laughter.
+
+Men rushed at him from all directions with their revolvers drawn, as
+quickly as if they had been waiting a long time anxiously for his
+appearance in that strange manner. But when they saw him sitting there
+laughing, with his little tattered round hat fallen forward over his
+forehead, they halted and put their revolvers back into their
+holsters.
+
+“Hello, boys,” cried Gypo. “Here I am. What are ye lookin’ at? I’ll
+fight any six men that ever walked this earth. Who’s first?”
+
+He jerked himself to his feet with one sudden forward movement, by
+drawing up one heel under him. He stood up, towering suddenly over
+those about him. They drew back. Mulholland, who at that moment was
+limping down the stairs with his hand to his right eye, sidestepped
+quickly with fright as Gypo stood up. He fell headlong past Gypo’s
+right shoulder into the arms of two men who reached out to receive
+him. Then Gallagher pushed his way to the front.
+
+“What’s the matter here?” he cried sharply. “To your posts, men,
+quickly. Well, Gypo? What’s troubling you now?”
+
+Gypo clicked his heels with a loud noise and saluted. He staggered
+slightly as he saluted. His face, wild with drunkenness, moved
+spasmodically, but he remained silent. He had not put on his muffler
+on leaving the brothel. His brown neck was bare, the muscles standing
+out like ridges on a mountainside. Then he jerked his hat back into
+its correct position and shuffled his feet. He broke into a low, thick
+laugh. He spoke.
+
+“You an’ me, Commandant,” he said with a foolish grin. “What ho! We’ll
+put ’em all on the run. What d’ye say?”
+
+Gallagher had been looking steadily at Gypo all the time without a
+single movement in his face. He turned away in silence and addressed
+Mulholland.
+
+“What’s the matter with your eye, Bartly?” he said.
+
+“Oh! he just came in me way,” interrupted Gypo taking a pace forward
+and patting Gallagher familiarly on the shoulder. “He came in me
+way—uh—an’ I hit him with the back o’ me hand. That’s all, upon me
+soul. He’ll be all right again with a bit o’ beefsteak. Don’t worry
+yersel’ about him, Commandant.”
+
+Gallagher drew away with an irritated gesture and walked back to the
+inquiry room. Mulholland looked at Gypo with savage hatred in his
+eyes. Gypo looked around him arrogantly with his chest swelled out.
+
+“Nolan,” called out Gallagher from the doorway of the inquiry room,
+“get into that room there across the passage. Third on your right.
+That’s it. Wait there until you are wanted. See?”
+
+“All right, Commandant. I see it. I—uh—damn that wall. Stand outa me
+way, will ye?”
+
+Gypo stalked down the passage, slightly unsteady on his feet and
+breathing heavily. He brought up suddenly against the wall again and
+laughed in his throat with his mouth shut. Then he headed straight for
+the room where the Rat Mulligan was sitting with his guard. When he
+had entered that room Gallagher beckoned to Mulholland. Mulholland
+came up. They both disappeared into the inquiry room. The sentries
+came to the doorway. They stood at ease across the doorway, facing the
+passage, with their drawn revolvers in their hands. “The preliminary
+investigation” had begun:
+
+Gypo subsided on to a chair beside the Rat Mulligan. He sat for
+several moments with a hand on each knee, staring intently at the
+ground in front of him, breathing through his nose and twitching his
+eyebrows that were like snouts. Then he raised his head and looked
+about him. He examined each of the armed men and nodded to each as he
+recognized him. They all nodded in return, but in a sour manner. Then
+he looked towards the huddled form of the Rat Mulligan and he screwed
+up his face in perplexity. He scratched his skull. He took off his hat
+and beat it, in a confused way, against his trousers leg, as if he
+were dusting it. Then he put it on his head again. He reached out his
+right hand as if to touch Mulligan’s shoulder, but when the hand was
+within an inch of Mulligan’s shoulder, he jerked it back suddenly.
+Then he jumped to his feet with an oath and stood facing Mulligan with
+his chest heaving.
+
+“Mulligan,” he whispered thickly, but with great force. “Hey, Rat!
+What ye doin’ here? Hey, Mulligan!”
+
+Mulligan never moved for two seconds. He sat on his chair, with his
+flat feet wide apart and his knees together, with his upturned palms
+resting on his knees and his head resting on his palms. His little
+emaciated body was covered with a heavy black overcoat, that hung
+about him unbuttoned, with its ends trailing on the floor. His hat lay
+on the ground beside him where it had fallen unheeded from his skull.
+His shaggy black hair was tousled and damp. Then he slowly raised his
+head to look at Gypo. His face was yellow and hollow cheeked, with
+great sorrowful dark eyes and a large mouth filled with two perfect
+rows of yellow teeth. His mouth was wide open. His eyes were staring
+and bloodshot. His whole body, ravaged by consumption, was terrible to
+behold. Gypo gasped, looking at it. A look of terror came into his
+little eyes.
+
+“Rat,” he whispered, “what brings ye here? Man alive, why aren’t ye in
+yer bed? This is no hour for a sick man to be out.”
+
+The Rat stared at Gypo aimlessly as if he had not heard him and could
+not see him. Then, slowly, his head subsided once more on to his
+palms. He shivered and sat still.
+
+Gypo came up to him softly. He stooped down and touched him on the
+shoulder, as if to console him or to sympathize with him. But as soon
+as his hand touched Mulligan he drew back with an oath. Through his
+drunken brain the whole memory of the evening’s proceedings rushed
+back under the influence of that touch. He remembered distinctly
+himself in the public-house, denouncing the Rat Mulligan to Gallagher,
+as the man who had informed against McPhillip.
+
+He looked about him suspiciously at the armed men. Their eyes were
+cast about the room indiscriminately, with the habitual bored look of
+men under discipline. They were taking absolutely no interest in Gypo
+or in the Rat Mulligan. Gypo sat down again. He took his head between
+his hands. He crushed his skull with all his might in a great effort
+to regain control of his faculties.
+
+For three minutes he sat that way, with all his strength concentrated
+in the effort to conquer his drunkenness. He was barely conscious of
+the effort he was making. It was instinct that warned him of the
+dangers that lay ahead of him, instinct aroused by the contact with
+Mulligan’s body. His drunkenness resisted fiercely. Continual waves of
+reckless delirium surged through his body, rising up from his chest to
+his head, with the spontaneous action of sea waves swelling up the
+side of an abrupt precipice. His head hummed and swayed. His eyes
+blinked. His tongue wagged loose and wanted to talk and sing and
+laugh. An unaccountable joy permeated him, a joy that did not
+originate in his actual self but in some strange being that had come
+to lodge in him temporarily. He could contemplate that new strange
+being with savage hatred as he pressed his hands against his skull.
+That being was an enemy of his. He must conquer him.
+
+At last he felt his drunkenness weakening, gradually, like the
+lessening of a pain at night. It did not disappear but its effects
+changed. Instead of feeling reckless and hilarious, he began to feel
+cunning, careful, gloomy, defiant, recklessly strong. His head cooled
+and steadied. It seemed to have become suddenly walled with steel, so
+that he almost experienced a physical pain from the pressure of his
+skull against the skin on his forehead. But he took away his hands
+from his forehead and he found that the pain vanished. His teeth set.
+His face assumed a look of stony apathy, the lips hanging flabbily,
+the cheeks loose, the eyes vacant. All the muscles of his body went
+loose, with the looseness of the athlete, who is standing at ease, but
+ready to plunge off somewhere like an arrow.
+
+In response to this change, as it were in his personality, he got to
+his feet in a dignified, calculated, imperious manner. He cleared his
+throat. He held out his right hand. He spoke.
+
+“Listen, men,” he said. “I had a drop taken when I came in here. I
+didn’t know what I was doin’. I just remembered now who I was talkin’
+to an’ it nearly knocked me dead. Look at him.” He pointed a thick,
+short, hairy forefinger at Mulligan. “He wouldn’t speak to me. He’s
+afraid to look at me. I know why. It’s him that informed on Frankie
+McPhillip an’ he knows that I saw him.”
+
+“It’s a lie,” screamed Mulligan, suddenly starting up and spreading
+out his hands and feet, downwards and outwards, as if he were resting
+exhausted after a race. His face was distorted with fear, amazement
+and rage. “It’s a lie, boys. It’s a lie I tell yez. Before the Blessed
+Mother of the Infant Jesus I swear on me knees that I never left the
+house to-day except to go to the chapel to say me prayers.”
+
+“Ha! Me fine boyo!” cried Gypo excitedly. “Will ye listen to his
+oaths? It’s easy work for an informer swearin’ oaths.”
+
+“Never—” began Mulligan again. But he was cut short by two of the
+armed men seizing him by the arms, forcing him back to his seat and
+putting a handkerchief over his mouth.
+
+At the same time Gallagher rushed out of the inquiry room and across
+the passage with his pistol in his hand. His sallow, lean face was
+aflame with anger. His eyes sparkled like points of fire. He looked at
+Gypo for a fleeting moment. It was no longer the cold, contemptuous,
+patronizing look with which he had regarded him in the public-house.
+It was a look of fierce, relentless hatred. “The preliminary
+investigation” had convinced him of something.
+
+Gypo, on the other hand, looked at Gallagher in a friendly, intimate,
+confident manner.
+
+“Here he is,” he said, pointing at the convulsing body of Mulligan.
+“He knows it’s all up with him already. He went into fits when I taxed
+him with it. So he did.”
+
+Then he opened his mouth and gave voice to a hoarse laugh.
+
+Gallagher smiled faintly into Gypo’s eyes. There was something
+diabolic in the smile. It was so inhuman.
+
+“Come on, you two witnesses,” he said icily. “You, Nolan, and you,
+Mulligan. You are wanted at the inquiry now. Lead them in, two of
+you.”
+
+Gypo walked across the passage jauntily, swinging his shoulders, with
+his chest thrown out with his head in the air. Mulligan had to be
+carried across. He sobbed all the way fitfully. The two sentries with
+drawn revolvers again took up their position in the doorway. Now,
+however, they had their backs to the passage. They faced the two
+witnesses. The two witnesses were seated on a small form in front of
+the larger table. They sat side by side. The two armed men who had
+conducted them into the room stood close behind them. The three judges
+sat in front of Gypo and of Mulligan at the large table. Gallagher sat
+at the little table to the right, with Mulholland standing a little to
+his rear, peering over his shoulder at what he was reading. To the
+right of the judges Mary McPhillip sat on a form alone.
+
+There was a deadly silence for several moments. Drops of water, one
+after another, in irregular succession, could be heard falling from
+the stone roof to the stone floor, near the walls. Then the centre
+judge spoke in a bored, drawling voice.
+
+“Take Peter Mulligan’s statement, comrade Gallagher,” he said.
+
+As soon as Mulligan heard his name mentioned he tried to jump to his
+feet, but the man standing behind him held him down. At the same time
+Gypo put his hand on Mulligan’s thigh and made a threatening gesture
+with his head.
+
+“Keep quiet, will ye? Ye rat!” he growled.
+
+“Peter Mulligan,” said Gallagher, “give an account of your whereabouts
+from noon to-day until midnight when you were brought in here.”
+
+Mulligan looked at Gallagher for some time before replying. He was
+obviously trying to speak. His lips moved. But terror held the tip of
+his tongue against his upper teeth. He could only jabber inaudibly.
+Then at last the tongue sprang loose and the words rushed out in a
+flood, incoherent, almost inarticulate, like the barking of a dog.
+Then he gasped. He paused. When he continued, his speech was regular
+and almost calm. He had become possessed of that meaningless courage
+that comes to nervous and timorous people, when they find themselves
+in a position where it is useless to be careful, or to exercise any
+control over themselves.
+
+“What’s the meaning of this treatment of a working-man?” he cried. “By
+you men that are supposed to be out for the freedom of the working
+class. Can ye find no better man to arrest an’ carry off in the middle
+o’ the night than me, that’s dyin’ on me feet o’ consumption? An’
+havin’, still an’ all, to work me hands off at me trade, tailorin’ an’
+stitchin’ in a basement, that’s more like the cave of a wild animal
+than a room. Me that’s——”
+
+“Mulligan,” interrupted Gallagher impassively but sharply, “I asked
+you for a statement of your whereabouts, between noon to-day and
+midnight to-night. You better be quick about your statement. We have
+no time to waste.”
+
+Suddenly Mulligan’s short-lived arrogance vanished. He looked around
+him on all sides pathetically. He saw only stern, unsympathetic faces.
+He sighed and dug his hands deep into his overcoat pockets. Then he
+drew the pockets closely about his body and crouched low on his seat.
+He began to speak in a meek, timorous voice.
+
+“Lemme see,” he said, looking at the ground. “At noon to-day, or let
+us say dinner time, if it’s the same to you, I was lyin’ in me bed. I
+had a bad pain in me right side from bronchitis all the mornin’ an’ I
+had to stay in bed with it. At one o’clock about, the old woman gev me
+a cup o’ tay an’ an egg. I remember I couldn’t ate the egg. Well,
+that’s no matter. I had to get up then, on account of a suit that has
+to be made for Mick Foley the carter. It’s got to be finished be
+Friday. His daughter is gettin’ married next Monday to——”
+
+“Don’t mind Foley’s daughter,” snapped Gallagher. “What had she got to
+do with your movements? Tell us about yourself.”
+
+Mulligan began to cough furiously. His body shook and he almost fell
+off the form. Then the fit subsided. He sat shivering and unable to
+speak.
+
+“Come on, Rat,” growled Gypo, nudging him with his elbow in the ribs.
+“Ye might as well come out with it now as another time. Go ahead an’
+tell ’em all about it.”
+
+Mulligan looked at Gypo. His lips trembled. His great dark eyes filled
+with tears. The terrific, massive countenance of Gypo, cunning with
+drunkenness, did not inspire him at that moment with fear. For some
+peculiar reason, his poor, shattered soul had gathered to itself just
+then a great courage. His withered face shone with a spiritual power.
+He spoke softly, tenderly, with pity.
+
+“It’s not for me to condemn ye,” he said; “maybe yer not responsible.”
+
+“Blast ye,” yelled Gypo, jumping to his feet. “What does he mean,
+Commandant Gallagher, about me not bein’ res-re-prosible? What does he
+mean by it? I want to know what he’s drivin’ at.”
+
+“Sit down, Nolan,” cried Gallagher. “Sit down immediately and keep
+quiet. Sit down, I say.”
+
+Gypo sat down with a clutter. He stared at Gallagher, with the
+strange, bewildered look of a dog that has been reprimanded by his
+master and is wondering why he has been reprimanded. For the first
+time he realized that there was a cold, dangerous ring in Gallagher’s
+voice. He sat immovable for two moments, without drawing breath,
+meditating on this hostile ring which he had heard in Gallagher’s
+voice.
+
+Unconsciously he took off his little, tattered, round, slouch hat. He
+pushed it, without looking at it, into his right-hand trousers pocket.
+
+Mulligan began again to talk.
+
+“Lemme see,” he said, “where was I? Oh, yes. I worked on till about
+half-past three or maybe a quarter to four, when Charlie Corrigan came
+in an’ said that his brother Dave had just come outa jail, after bein’
+on hunger strike for eighteen days. Ye remember he was thrown in on
+account of the Slum Rents Agitation. ‘He’s upstairs,’ says Charlie.
+Well, I went up an’ we talked over a cup o’ tay until about six
+o’clock. It was just six when I left, because I heard the angelus
+beginnin’ to strike an’ I on me way down the stairs, because I stopped
+to cross mesel’. Then I ran down home an’ put on me overcoat and went
+out to the chapel. I’m makin’ the Stations o’ the Cross for . . .” He
+stopped and flushed. . . . “Well, it’s no matter to no man why I’m
+makin’ em.”
+
+“All right, then,” snapped Gallagher. “We don’t want to know why you
+are making them. We merely want facts, not superstitions. You went
+into the chapel at six o’clock, or a few minutes afterwards to be
+precise. How far is the chapel from your house?”
+
+“Maybe it’s a hundred yards, maybe it’s more. If ye go around the
+corner be Kane’s it’s less, but be goin’ the other road around——”
+
+“Oh, damn the other road. Pardon me, Miss McPhillip. Let us say it’s
+one hundred yards. You arrived at the chapel then at about three
+minutes past six. That correct?”
+
+“Uh . . . that ud be right . . . about that.”
+
+“Well? How long did you stay there?”
+
+“I stayed there until about half-past six. An’ then I stayed talkin’
+outside the door to Fr. Conroy for maybe ten minutes. He wanted to
+know——”
+
+“Did you talk to anybody other than the priest you mention?”
+
+“I’m comin’ to that. After I left Fr. Conroy I met Barney Kerrigan.”
+
+“Where? Near the chapel?”
+
+“Yes. It must have been within fifty yards of it, as yer goin’ be
+measurements, although we never——”
+
+“Just a moment. Were you ever a member of the Revolutionary
+Organization?”
+
+“What makes ye ask that? Does any man know better than yersel’ whether
+I was or not?”
+
+“_Were you a member?_”
+
+“Sure I was.”
+
+“That’s better. Why did you leave it?”
+
+“I left it, Commandant Gallagher, for reasons that are known to
+yersel’ as well as they are to me.” His voice became passionate and
+shrill. “I left it because the only one I cared for in this world,
+outside me old woman, that’s me sister, came to her doom through it.
+But it’s not for me to judge. It’s not for me . . .”
+
+“Very well,” interrupted Gallagher. “You left the Organization owing
+to a personal grievance. Was that grievance against any particular
+member of the Organization?”
+
+“I bear no fellow-man a grudge,” cried Mulligan solemnly.
+
+“You had no grievance against Francis Joseph McPhillip?”
+
+“Lord have mercy on his soul,” cried Mulligan, crossing himself with
+his eyes on the ceiling. “I hope his sorrows are over him.” He turned
+to Miss McPhillip. “I swear on me immortal soul, Miss McPhillip, that
+I bore no grudge agin yer brother.”
+
+“All right,” said Gallagher. “Well. Tell us what you did after leaving
+Barney Kerrigan.”
+
+“I went back to the house after that. I did another bit o’ work until
+about eight o’clock. I didn’t do much because fellahs kept comin’ in
+an’ out an’ me eyes are not as good as they used to be an’ the gas now
+is a disgrace to the city. But anyhow, I finished the waistcoat. Then
+I went upstairs to Jim Daly’s room on the third floor. Poor man, he’s
+sick this three years with bad kidneys. Only for a pension he has outa
+the British Navy, there’s no knowin’ what ud happen to him, an’ he
+havin’ no one to look after him but himself, an’ he that delicate. We
+had a smoke an’ a talk until about ten o’clock. Then I came down
+again. The old woman had just come in, so we had another cup o’ tay
+an’ a herring. Then I sat be the fire readin’ a newspaper until about
+half-past eleven. Then I began to pouch about makin’ ready to go to
+bed, when three men under Tommy Connor came in an’ put a mask over me
+face an’ bundled me into a car, without by yer leave, as if I was a
+criminal. That’s all.”
+
+There was a slight pause. Everybody sighed for some reason.
+
+“Very good, Mulligan,” said Gallagher. “That will do.”
+
+He got up and went over to the judges’ table. The four of them talked
+for about two minutes. The centre judge read from a paper in a
+mumbling voice. Another judge took notes, scratching loudly with his
+pen. There was a pause. Then another discussion in whispers began.
+Then Gallagher came back to his seat.
+
+“Nolan,” he said, quite suddenly, “repeat the statement concerning
+Peter Mulligan that you made to me in Ryan’s public-house in Titt
+Street at ten-forty-five this night.”
+
+“Yes, Commandant,” said Gypo immediately.
+
+He cleared his throat aggressively and rattled off the story about his
+having seen Mulligan track Francis Joseph McPhillip out of the Dunboy
+Lodging House. He spoke in a clear, loud and distinct voice, making
+arrogant gestures and looking straight into Gallagher’s eyes as he
+spoke.
+
+Mulligan kept trembling while Gypo spoke. He seemed all the time
+trying to interrupt, but although his lips twitched and his hands
+trembled he neither moved nor spoke.
+
+Gypo finished speaking. His loud, strong voice died out, leaving a
+sudden silence behind it. There was another slight pause.
+
+“What time exactly did you see Mulligan leave the lodging-house?” said
+Gallagher.
+
+“Just half-past six,” replied Gypo immediately. “I know because I
+looked at the clock in the hall.”
+
+“Very well,” said Gallagher. “That will do you, Nolan. Miss McPhillip,
+what time did your brother arrive at your father’s house?”
+
+“He arrived at ten minutes to seven,” said Mary, after a little pause,
+during which she blushed slightly, glanced at Gallagher and then
+looked at the ground. “It might be a little earlier than that, but not
+more than a minute or so. I had just come in from business.”
+
+“Did he say anything about being followed when he came?”
+
+“No. On the contrary, he said that he was certain that he was not
+noticed since he came into town at half-past five. Mother was very
+worried about his being in town, and she wanted to get him away
+immediately, but he was so confident about being safe that she thought
+it was all right his staying for the night. He said he met Nolan at
+the lodging-house. That was the only person he spoke to, he said. He
+came by back streets after leaving the lodging-house. He never stopped
+anywhere and he spoke to nobody. He crossed the river at the Metal
+Bridge. It was pitch-black at that time on account of the rain and the
+fog. Anybody that knew Frankie’s way of going along, listening to
+every sound, with ears as sharp as a fox, could hardly believe that he
+was followed without his knowing it. He came in suddenly by the back
+entrance through the yard. We thought it was his ghost,” she said with
+a little shiver of remembrance. She stopped and put her handkerchief
+to her face.
+
+“Thank you, Miss McPhillip,” said Gallagher. “Barney Kerrigan out
+there?”
+
+“Kerrigan there?”
+
+“Kerrigan?”
+
+“Yes. I’m coming,” came a voice from along the passage somewhere.
+
+A tall man, wearing a black slouch hat and a new, though shabby, grey
+overcoat with a velvet collar, came into the room. He had a revolver
+strapped over his overcoat at the waist. He saluted and stood to
+attention.
+
+“Did you meet Peter Mulligan at six-thirty this evening?” said
+Gallagher.
+
+“Yes, Commandant,” replied Kerrigan. “I saw him just about that time
+comin’ down the street. He stopped me to know did I know anythin’ for
+the Grand National.”
+
+“Very well. You are quite sure about the time?”
+
+“Well, I couldn’t give ye the exact second, but it couldn’t be more
+than a minute one way or the other. I knocked off work at six an’ it
+takes me always just about twenty minutes to walk from the quays as
+far as Farelly’s. Well, I had a pint in Farelly’s an’ I stopped for a
+few minutes to talk to the boys, an’ then when I came out I met Peter
+Mulligan. Just about half-past six I’d say it was.”
+
+“Very well,” said Gallagher, “return to your post. Peter Mulligan, you
+can go now. You will be taken home in the car that brought you here
+and we’ll see you right for any inconvenience that was caused to you.”
+He walked over to the judges and whispered something hurriedly. They
+all nodded and put their hands in their pockets. “One moment,
+Mulligan,” he called. They all gave him money. He added some from his
+own pocket. He came over to Mulligan and handed him a fistful of
+silver. “For the present this might help you. I’ll see what can be
+done for you later on. I’ll bring your case up before the Relief
+Committee. Good-night, Comrade.”
+
+Mulligan took the money with bowed head. He got up and moved to the
+door hurriedly without saying a word, with his hat crushed in his two
+hands and his overcoat flapping behind him. He disappeared out the
+door, head first, stooping, hauling his two flat feet after him as if
+he were dragging them against their will. Then, with a hard, biting
+cough he disappeared.
+
+The sentries stood again across the door. Gallagher walked slowly back
+to his table. He sat down. There was a deadly silence.
+
+The silence lasted only about twelve seconds. During this pause
+Gallagher took out a notebook and turned over the pages, while
+Mulholland bent over his shoulder whispering something, and the three
+judges murmured with their heads close together. But to Gypo these
+twelve seconds were as long as twelve years to a man stricken with a
+painful and incurable disease. A succession of terrors flitted through
+his mind. They were not ideas or thoughts, but almost tangible terrors
+that seemed to materialize in his brain as the result of the reasoning
+of some foreign being. His cunning and his assurance were gripped
+suddenly by that amazing foreigner and hurled out of him, clean out of
+him into oblivion, like two bullets fired through the air.
+
+Ha! They were hurled out of him by the amazing fact of Mulligan’s
+disappearance, free, with money in his pocket given to him by
+Gallagher. They had given him money. They had called him comrade. They
+had promised to bring his case up before the Relief Committee. They
+sent him away free. He had gone. . . . Jesus, Mary and Joseph! What
+was the meaning of it?
+
+Then suddenly, as he sat there, bolt upright on his seat, massive,
+those unspeakable terrors crowded into his mind. They came ready-made,
+fully matured, nauseating like bilious attacks, sharp and biting like
+bayonet wounds, heavy and ponderous like palpitations of the heart.
+They came, one, two, three, four . . . scores of them, lining up in
+his brain, shoulder to shoulder, in a mass, standing there solidly and
+then immediately disappearing like ghosts without a sound and giving
+place to others. There was a mass of them but each one was distinct.
+Each had its own peculiar silent screech. Each had its own peculiar
+demoniac grin. Each had its own peculiar . . . damn them all! The
+curse of them was that he did not know what they were. It seemed that
+his personality was bound in chains and he was unable to grapple with
+the cursed things. He must sit still, bolt upright on his wooden form,
+and permit them to stand there unchallenged in his brain. He was
+helpless. A cold sweat came out through every pore of his body.
+
+Four seconds passed. Then his mind began to grope about among the
+terrors, timorously, like a snail that has been touched and has gone
+into his shell feigning death and has come out again touching blades
+of grass suspiciously and wriggling its horns. Gypo opened his
+nostrils and his mouth. He drew in a deep breath through both organs
+simultaneously. The cold sweat suddenly became warm. His blood flooded
+his head with a surging movement. He became ferocious. At first his
+eyes narrowed and his eyebrows that were like snouts bent down. Then
+his eyes opened wide and his eyebrows lifted, like guns that are
+elevated in order to train them on a target. His lower lip dropped.
+His mind began to work methodically. The terrors vanished out of it
+and gave place to an iron determination to fight to the bitter end.
+
+With his blood maddened by alcohol, he became conscious of the vast
+strength in his body. He almost experienced a feeling of happiness at
+this opportunity for using it. It was that savage joy that is always
+present in the Irish soul in time of danger, the great fighting spirit
+of our race, born of the mists and the mountains and the gurgling
+torrents and the endless clamour of the sea.
+
+He looked around him measuring those against whom he had to fight. To
+his left he saw Mary McPhillip sitting. She had her hands in her lap.
+She was leaning forward slightly, with a nervous expectant look in her
+eyes, looking at Gallagher. She cast a terrified glance, occasionally,
+towards Gypo, but her eyes always came back to Gallagher’s face as if
+they were fascinated by it. It was obvious that she was terrified and
+that her mind was trying to keep itself fixed on the object of the
+prayers which her moving lips were uttering. Gypo saw the terror in
+her quivering face and knew that he had nothing to fear from her. Then
+he looked at the three judges. He knew those masked men. They were
+merely puppets, politicians, figure-heads who would do Gallagher’s
+bidding, afraid to contradict him. Ha! Gallagher was the man he had to
+fight. Gallagher and that rat Mulholland. He saw them over by the
+little table with their heads together. He fixed his eyes on them.
+
+Feverishly he set himself to form a plan, not that he hoped anything
+at this hour from the formation of a plan, but merely because making a
+plan was an end in itself to his peculiar reason. But he could not
+even think of a plan. All his energies were concentrated on
+maintaining his anger at fever heat. He struggled feebly with threads
+of ideas and then dropped them hopelessly. He doubled up his fists and
+held them, knuckles downwards, one on each hip. The two armed men who
+stood behind him, saw his back muscles rise and strain against his
+dungaree jacket.
+
+Then the silence broke. Gallagher got up with his open notebook in his
+hand. He walked over to the judges’ table. He placed the notebook in
+front of the judges, pointing out something with his finger. The
+centre judge nodded. Gallagher walked back again to his table and sat
+down. Gypo followed every movement with frenzied excitement. He seemed
+to be on the point of jumping to his feet and rushing at Gallagher.
+The two sentries in the doorway and the two armed men standing behind
+Gypo’s back slipped their fingers over their revolver triggers. They
+leaned forward slightly. There was a tense moment. Then Gallagher
+looked at Gypo and began to speak sharply, in a low, restrained voice.
+
+“Now Gypo,” he began, “tell us how you spent your time from six
+o’clock this evening until you came in here at half-past one. Hurry
+up. Don’t waste any time. We are in a hurry.”
+
+Gypo’s eyes almost shut. Then his face seemed to swell. His mouth
+contorted.
+
+“What’s it got to do with you where I ben?” he thundered in a queer,
+hollow voice. It seemed his mouth had gone dry.
+
+“You never know,” said Gallagher carelessly. “It might be interesting
+for us to know. Don’t you feel like telling us how you’ve been amusing
+yourself from the time you met Francis Joseph McPhillip at six o’clock
+in the Dunboy Lodging House until you came in here?”
+
+“An’ supposin’ I don’t tell ye, what are ye goin’ to do? Wha’?”
+
+“Well, I’m not going to tell you that. But we can do a lot. You know
+that yourself, don’t you? You have your choice in the matter. You
+either tell me or I’ll go to the trouble of telling you and the court
+myself.” He paused for an instant and then added: “with the help of
+Bartly Mulholland here.”
+
+Then he stared at Gypo dispassionately, with the cold and indifferent
+look of a man examining a statue. Gypo’s chest heaved in and out. He
+had not been prepared for this point-blank attack from Gallagher. He
+had expected that Gallagher would adopt his usual tactics of
+friendliness and cajolery, trusting to madden his prey into letting
+some choice important word slip unawares from his lips. Gypo felt
+himself actually cheated out of his rights by this insultingly crude
+and insolent attack. Gallagher was not even doing him the honour of
+playing with him. Then he must know everything already. Did he?
+
+The last trace of his self-control left Gypo. He abandoned himself to
+a frenzy of passion. A delirious wave of ferocity mastered him. He
+clenched his fists so that the bones cracked. His right leg went so
+rigid that the boot rushed along the stone floor with a harsh scraping
+sound, until it brought up with a bang against the leg of the form.
+There it stayed. His knee was pointed and shivering. He opened his
+mouth and yelled, almost incoherently, a torrent of blasphemous and
+obscene oaths at Gallagher. He yelled them in an endless sentence,
+without a verb or pronoun or conjunction. He kept yelling until he had
+to stop for breath.
+
+When Gypo stopped, Mary McPhillip’s sobs became audible. She was
+trembling violently and sobbing. Gallagher got up, walked past Gypo
+without taking the slightest notice of him and took Mary by the arm.
+He led her up to the judge’s table.
+
+“I have no further need of this witness,” he said, “so I suppose I may
+take her into another room.”
+
+The judges nodded. He led Mary out of the room. Gypo’s eyes followed
+him everywhere. He was staring wildly and he seemed to have lost all
+power of directing his bodily activities. He was shivering
+spasmodically in his legs. Gallagher came back into the room and sat
+down at his table.
+
+Still Gypo’s eyes were concentrated on Gallagher’s face. His outburst
+had left him completely empty, like a shaken sack. There was a pain at
+the pit of the stomach. Mob orators know that pain, when they have
+spoken for over an hour under a perfect hail of frenzied
+interruptions. His eyes were dazed. Some machinal force kept his eyes
+concentrated on Gallagher’s face. He responded to every movement of
+Gallagher’s face in a half-conscious way. Every time Gallagher moved a
+limb he felt a sharp stab in the pit of the stomach. He was conscious
+of even the most minute movements. A thing that terrified him
+especially was Gallagher’s chronic habit of twitching his cheeks by
+grinding his back teeth at intervals.
+
+As before, this agony lasted during a few moments only, during the
+time that Gallagher was looking at some notes on his table, with
+furrowed forehead. But the moments seemed years, the agony was so
+concentrated. Gallagher spoke again.
+
+Then again a strange change came over Gypo. For as soon as Gallagher
+spoke he felt an instantaneous relief. He breathed deeply. He sighed.
+A delicious tremor swept over his body like a cool breeze sweeping the
+back of a sultry sea in summer. His jaws set again. Gallagher’s voice
+had a different ring in it. It was softer. It was friendly. It
+was . . . honour bright . . . it was argumentative. Then there was a
+chance. . . . There must be a chance yet. . . .
+
+“What did you mean, Gypo?” cried Gallagher. “What did you mean by
+telling us all those lies about the Rat Mulligan? You should be
+ashamed of yourself. Even if you got a grudge against a man, that’s no
+reason why you should try to get a thing like that slung on to him.
+Good Lord! You’re a funny man, Gypo. What put it into your head to
+tell me that you saw him this evening at the Dunboy Lodging House,
+when we know very well that he was within one hundred yards of his own
+home at that very minute, three miles away or more? Were you drunk or
+what?”
+
+“I know I was drunk,” cried Gypo, responding joyfully to this friendly
+overture from Gallagher. His anger vanished. His whole soul leaned out
+eagerly towards Gallagher, craving support. He paused momentarily
+after uttering the first sentence. He remained silent, leaning
+forward, looking at Gallagher, intently, as if he expected Gallagher
+to finish the statement for him. But when Gallagher’s thin lips
+remained sealed, he hurtled on excitedly, as if he were stumbling
+recklessly through dangerous obstacles. His voice was uneven and
+flurried. “But I’d swear be Almighty God that it was him I saw goin’
+out the door and runnin’ up the lane after Frankie. An’ if it wasn’t
+him it must have been somebody else like him, for I’d know the cut of
+his shoulders anywhere. I would if ye put my head in a bag.”
+
+“You told me,” continued Gallagher in the same friendly scolding tone,
+“that you followed the Rat across town until you came to . . . Where
+was that you said you lost sight of him? I forgot now.”
+
+Gypo started and stuttered. Good Lord, what had he said? He must say
+the same thing he had said before. But he could not remember saying
+that he followed the Rat across town. Did he say it in the
+public-house or did he not. His forehead was burning. The hammering at
+the top of his skull was blinding his eyes with pain. Almost
+unconsciously he put his hand to his forehead and blurted out,
+pathetically, on a peculiar high note, an amazingly childish and
+hysterical sentence.
+
+“Commandant, I’m all mixed up an’ I can remember nothin’.”
+
+It was horrid, that pitiful, forlorn cry of pain and of absolute
+despair coming from such a giant.
+
+“All right then,” said Gallagher, “don’t worry yourself. We have to
+get to the bottom of this business, so we’ll just set to work, the two
+of us, and maybe we can piece the whole thing together. Now the best
+thing we can do is to begin at the end and go backwards. We’ll work
+backwards until we come to the point where you lost that man you saw
+tracking Frankie McPhillip out of the Dunboy Lodging House. In that
+case we’ll begin with where you were before you came in here. Bartly
+Mulholland tells us that you were at Aunt Betty’s, with a woman called
+Connemara Maggie. You must have been with her, because Bartly saw you
+with his own eyes giving her two pound notes. There were three empty
+whisky bottles in the room. They had been bought by you, I suppose.
+Well? A man is entitled to drink his own whisky that he has bought
+with his _own_ money, I suppose. That has got nothing to do with our
+business, has it Gypo? None whatsoever. We merely want to trace that
+man that tracked Francis Joseph McPhillip out of the Dunboy Lodging
+House. Well! What do we find next? A friend of yours called Katie Fox,
+once upon a time a comrade of ours, they are all to the front in this
+business, all those people that were once comrades of ours, she told
+Bartly Mulholland that you gave three pounds to an English woman at
+Aunt Betty’s and two pounds to Aunt Betty to pay a debt for this
+woman. You wanted to send her back to London. A kind of Barnardo’s
+Home or something, this Aunt Betty’s, for stray women. Well, of
+course, that again has nothing to do with us. A man is entitled to do
+what he likes with his _own_ money. But. . . . Good Lord, Gypo,” he
+cried, striking the table and bursting out into a strange hilarious
+laugh, “you were having a time of it. Where did you get all the money?
+Ha! Now don’t get excited. I know it’s no business of mine. But
+if you’re going to be taken back into the Organization . . . Well!
+There are ugly rumours flying about. . . . You know the way silly
+rumours fly around Dublin. It’s awful. But the fact is, that people
+are talking about sailors, American sailors, being robbed at the
+back of Cassidy’s public-house. It’s only a rumour, of course, and
+again, that friend of yours, Katie Fox—shall we call her one of our
+ex-comrades?—she is responsible for the rumour, according to Bartly
+Mulholland. Of course, it’s obviously originated with her. She has
+very probably invented that story out of spite, simply because you
+went with the other girl. Or . . . Tell me, is there any truth in it,
+Gypo? I mean in the rumour of your having robbed a sailor?”
+
+Gypo started, as if out of a heavy sleep. His brain went “thud, thud,
+thud,” trying to think whether he should say “yes,” or “no.” If he
+said “yes,” would he be caught in the act of telling a lie? If he said
+“no,” would he be able to find any other means of explaining how he
+got the money? Several other questions and problems also crowded into
+his mind simultaneously, in confusion. There were doubts,
+uncertainties and suspicions. He was completely in a mesh. His mind
+was like a refuse heap. There was no beginning or end to any chain of
+reasoning. He gave it up in despair.
+
+“Commandant,” he said, again touching his forehead, “I can make out
+nothin’. My head is sore. I must be drunk.”
+
+Again it was the same bewildered, agonizing cry of a lost human soul.
+A weak, thin, childish voice, coming from a giant.
+
+“Well, never mind,” said Gallagher cheerfully, “we’ll leave it at
+that. We’ll carry on. Before you went down to Aunt Betty’s, Mulholland
+saw you in a fish-and-chip shop, treating a crowd of people to a free
+meal. He said you spent about a pound there. Two pounds, three pounds,
+two pounds, one pound. . . . Well! You certainly were in a generous
+mood. American sailors are paid well of course. Throwing money about
+in all directions, eh? Like a millionaire! But of course that’s your
+own business. We are simply trying to get at the bottom of the
+business we have in hand. That business is simply this: _who informed
+on your pal Francis Joseph McPhillip?_”
+
+Gallagher uttered the sentence slowly and in a loud voice, looking
+closely at Gypo as he did so. Gypo started. His lips opened wide. But
+he remained silent. His lips moved, forming the words Gallagher had
+uttered, silently.
+
+Gallagher watched the movement of Gypo’s lips with curious detachment.
+Then he smiled slightly before continuing.
+
+“Before that of course,” he continued, “I met you myself in the
+public-house, in—er—Ryan’s public-house in Titt Street. There was
+where you told me that funny story about the Rat Mulligan. Ha, ha, ha!
+Ha, ha, ha! . . .”
+
+Gallagher suddenly roared with laughter, holding his sides, with his
+head in the air. Gypo almost leaped from his form. He trembled.
+
+“Well, of all the stories!” continued Gallagher, pretending to gasp
+with laughter. “I can’t make out why you told me that story, Gypo. I
+can’t make it out. Well, there’s no knowing. . . . But we must get on
+with our own work. Time’s running short and we have some stiff work to
+do before the night’s over. Some stiff work, Gypo. Well? Before you
+came into the public-house you were in Francis McPhillip’s house in 44
+Titt Street. There again, you seemed to be acting in a very funny way,
+according to Bartly Mulholland. Of course, I can understand your being
+stirred up and excited on account of the death of your pal. But
+still. . . . Do you remember giving Mrs. McPhillip the money that fell
+out of your pocket on to the kitchen floor? What did you do that for?
+Eh? Good Lord! You have left a trail of gold after you all the
+evening. I wish it were as easy to track the man you saw coming out of
+the Dunboy Lodging House after Frankie. But why did you give that few
+shillings to Mrs. McPhillip and say it was all the money you had when
+you knew very well you had a lot more in your pocket at that very
+moment?”
+
+“I don’t know,” growled Gypo.
+
+His voice was no longer weak and childish. He was stiffening again.
+
+“Maybe you were drunk even then,” suggested Gallagher, almost
+excitedly, as if he were deliberately trying to apologize for Gypo’s
+absurdities. “Maybe you were drunk. What?”
+
+“Didn’t I tell ye before I was drunk,” grunted Gypo.
+
+“Ha! I knew ye were drunk. Where had you been drinking?”
+
+“Couldn’t tell ye where, but I know I was drinkin’ with Katie Fox.”
+
+“Ha! Now we have it,” cried Gallagher, striking the table.
+
+“Now you got what?” yelled Gypo, panting and leaning forward savagely.
+He opened his fists out like claws. He spread his feet out ready to
+spring. “What have ye got, Commandant?” he yelled hoarsely.
+
+Gallagher took his pistol by the butt and tapped the muzzle slightly
+on the table three times. The two armed men pointed their revolvers at
+Gypo’s back. The three judges who had been calmly smoking cigarettes
+started. Mulholland made a slight movement towards the door.
+
+Then Gypo subsided into his seat loosely. The dreadful fascination of
+Gallagher’s cold eyes sucked his passion clean out of him. Breathing
+in a tired way, he sat still. The tension relaxed again. Gallagher
+laid his pistol on the table and smiled.
+
+“No need to have got excited, Gypo,” he said. “I was just saying that
+it was when you were drinking with Katie Fox you said you robbed a
+sailor at the back of Cassidy’s public-house. Maybe she asked you
+where you got the money out of pure idle curiosity and you told her
+that as a joke. We all know what curious creatures women are. That
+doesn’t matter, though. What does matter is this. Could you remember
+what time that was? When you were drinking with Katie Fox? What time
+was it?”
+
+“I can’t say,” mumbled Gypo stolidly. “I’m drunk. I can’t remember.”
+
+“Well, now that’s a pity,” said Gallagher. “For it’s very important
+for us to find out what that time was. If we were able to find out
+what time that was, then we would surely be able to find out lots
+more. Let us say it was nine o’clock at that time. Let us say nine.
+That wouldn’t be far out? Would it be far out, Gypo?”
+
+“How do I know what time it was?” roared Gypo. “Amn’t I tellin’ ye
+that I was drunk?”
+
+“Well, now,” continued Gallagher, getting a little more excited, “we
+have got as far as nine o’clock. We are as far back as nine o’clock.”
+
+He paused. His face began to light up and his forehead began to
+wrinkle. His eyes were no longer steely and cold. They became restless
+points, fiery and full of turbulent activity. They kept roaming over
+Gypo’s face. His lips, on the contrary, were creased at the corners in
+a strange, dry smile. His voice was laughing and at a slightly higher
+and sweeter pitch.
+
+“Now we have arrived at nine o’clock,” he continued, “travelling
+backwards. Great way this for travelling, Gypo. You never know what
+you are going to bump against without knowing. Any minute now we are
+liable to find something, Gypo. We might in a few moments, even jump
+on the man that informed on Frankie McPhillip. _We might jump on him._
+Now! Easy there, Gypo. I mean the man you saw tracking Frankie
+McPhillip out of the Dunboy Lodging House. Could you give the court
+any idea of the description of that man you saw? You say he was like
+Mulligan? Do you say he was like Mulligan? Speak, man. _Speak, I
+say_,” he roared.
+
+But Gypo was no longer able to speak.
+
+A sudden transformation had come over him. As a thunder-storm bursts
+over a calm sea on a sultry day, rending the oily ocean back and
+covering it with cavorting, black ridges and white, churning froth, so
+his body and soul responded to the sudden lightning in Gallagher’s
+eyes and the ominous crackle of his voice, uttering sugared threats,
+gambolling devilishly with words. He crumbled away into an immense,
+flabby, supine mass, that writhed on the wooden form, a tangled heap
+of limbs lying piled helplessly. His head dropped forward on his
+chest, swaying from side to side on the pivot of his chin. His eyes
+sank into their sockets. His face went ashen and still. His legs
+became lax. His stomach wrinkled up like an unpropped wall collapsing
+on its own foundations. His whole body shivered and started into
+awe-inspiring movement, monstrous and inhuman, revolting as a
+spectacle of degrading vice and yet pitiful in its helplessness.
+
+All the countless centuries of human development that had left their
+impression on that body, to make it into the glorious image of a
+God-like human being, withered away during that time of agony, leaving
+only a chaotic collection of limbs writhing and strange visions racing
+over his convulsing features.
+
+The sight was fearsome even to the callous men that surrounded him.
+Even _their_ hardened souls saw a vision of a strange life just then,
+an unknown and unexpected phantom that comes to some once in their
+lives and that never comes to many, the phantom of a human soul
+stripped naked of the covering of civilization, lying naked and
+horror-stricken, without help, without hope of mercy. They forgot for
+the moment their hatred of him. They forgot that this helpless,
+shapeless mass of humanity was a menace to their lives. They forgot
+that he was a viper they must crush. They only knew at that moment,
+that he was a poor, weak human being like themselves, a human soul,
+weak and helpless in suffering, shivering in the toils of the eternal
+struggle of the human soul with pain.
+
+Their mouths opened wide. Their eyes grew soft. Some made unconscious
+movements with their hands, others with their feet, unconscious
+movements of which their minds were not aware. For their minds,
+disciplined by the corroding influence of hatred, sat still and
+indifferent.
+
+One man alone revelled in Gypo’s agony. He revelled in it
+unconsciously. He was no longer conscious of his emotions. He had
+become demented, drunk with the fury of his hatred. That man was
+Gallagher.
+
+He rose lightly from the table, without a word, pawing the table
+softly with his hands for support, like a panther finding foothold for
+a spring. His lean, glossy, sallow face was lit with a glow of
+passionate eagerness, like a lover approaching his beloved. But it was
+not the pure, resplendent eagerness of love. It was the eagerness of
+the preying beast about to spring. The lips laughed, thin, wrinkled,
+red lips drawn upwards and downwards from the set, white teeth. The
+eyes glittered. The forehead twitched. The hands trembled. The whole
+body shivered slightly, with those minute shivers that pass down the
+side of a setter when he stands poised over his prey. He rose
+gradually from the table. He stepped over his chair with his right
+foot, to avoid moving the chair. He released his body from contact
+with the table and the chair. His eyes were fixed on Gypo’s face. He
+stood crouching. His head was swung forward, almost on a level with
+his stooping shoulders. He groped with his right hand on the table for
+his pistol. His fingers found the butt. Slowly they embraced it. The
+forefinger sought the trigger and found it. He lifted the pistol from
+the table. He brought it with a sharp movement to his hip. Its muzzle
+pointed at Gypo’s chest. He took one short pace forward.
+
+Gypo uttered a sharp yell and put his two hands to his face, shielding
+his eyes. But he took them away again almost immediately. They dropped
+to his sides. He must look at Gallagher’s eyes. He could not remain
+hidden from those eyes. They burned into his flesh unless he looked at
+them with his own.
+
+Gallagher spoke. His voice was almost inaudible. It was soft and sweet
+like a girl’s voice.
+
+“As you seem to have lost your voice,” he whispered, “I had better
+tell you myself who that man was. There’s no need to describe him for
+the court. The court can see the man for themselves. I’m going to tell
+the court the very name of the informer that betrayed his comrade,
+Francis Joseph McPhillip, I’m going to point out the informer with my
+own hand. That is the man,” he cried suddenly, with terrific force,
+turning to the judges and pointing his pistol at Gypo. “Comrades, the
+informer is Gypo Nolan, who is sitting there on that form.”
+
+He had scarcely finished when Gypo uttered a muffled scream like a
+dumb animal in mortal agony. He tumbled forward to the stone floor. He
+frothed at the mouth. He reached out his trembling hands towards
+Gallagher.
+
+“Commandant,” he cried, “I didn’t know what I was doin’. I declare to
+God I didn’t know what I was doin’. Can’t ye see what I mane?” He
+raised his voice to a scream and he kept dragging himself forward over
+the floor towards Gallagher’s feet. Then he struggled to his hands and
+knees. He stretched out his hands on either side, panting: “Is there
+no man here to tell him why I did it? I can’t tell him. My head is
+sore. I can’t tell him. Commandant, Commandant, you an’ me,
+Commandant. We’ll make a plan, the two of us . . . uh-r-r-r. . . .”
+
+His voice sank into an inarticulate jabber as his hands clutched
+Gallagher’s boots and he sank again prone to the ground. His thick
+lips that tried to kiss Gallagher’s boots were imprinting kisses on
+the stone flags. Gallagher kicked away the clutching hands and called
+out sharply:
+
+“Take him to the cell and place him under close guard.”
+
+Immediately the four armed men rushed forward and bent down to seize
+Gypo. But as soon as they touched him, he stiffened. He immediately
+rose with them to his feet, with an accession of unaccountable
+strength. He shook the four men off with a shrug of his whole body.
+Then he was about to crouch to rush at Gallagher, when the four of
+them flung themselves upon him again with a simultaneous cry. He
+swayed for a moment on bent thighs, reeling under the impact of the
+four bodies, two of them on his back, two gripping him about the
+waist. Then he took a fierce, taut step forward with his right foot,
+gasping as he did so. He planted the boot on the floor with a ringing
+sound and then jerked himself backwards. The two men who had landed on
+his back, flung their arms around his neck and swayed, banging their
+heads together, their legs flying adrift. A cry arose: “Overpower him.
+Help! Help!”
+
+The three judges moved back from the table and stood against the wall,
+undecided whether to run for safety, or to rush to the attack.
+
+Mulholland pulled at Gallagher’s arm excitedly.
+
+“Will I fire, Commandant?” he whispered.
+
+“Don’t shoot,” murmured Gallagher in a dazed, sleepy voice. He was
+staring at the struggling men with a sad smile on his face, as if he
+were dreaming. “Don’t shoot. He’s not sentenced yet. Don’t fire, I
+tell you.”
+
+Then Mulholland ran crouching and threw himself at Gypo’s legs, trying
+to encompass them with his arms. There were now five men hanging on to
+Gypo. He was like Laocoön, entwined with snakes. He stood bolt
+upright, with every muscle on his body knotted.
+
+Then he lurched away to the right towards the door, with that human
+cargo, unmoored and swinging by the sudden lurch, clashing with soft
+thuds, in a panting mass. He was brought within three paces of the
+door by the lurch. He saw the door. With an immense wrench that made
+his biceps crack, he shook the men from off his back and neck. They
+slithered downwards with a scratching sound of their nails clawing his
+clothes. They clung round his hips. Then he growled and stooped down
+to manhandle the men that clung to his legs. His groping hands
+clutched Mulholland’s hair. His fingers groped downwards, seeking the
+throat to garrotte him, when a mad rush of feet startled him. He
+looked up.
+
+They were rushing at him through the doorway. He saw them for a
+moment, a number of flashing eyes, and set lips and clawing hands,
+rushing at him. Then he dived headlong at his new enemies. He forced
+them backwards in a mass into the doorway. There they all fell, amid
+yells and hissing curses and shrieks of pain. Then Gypo’s great boots
+stuck out of the pile in the centre, while Mulholland’s grinning,
+sallow face peered up between them.
+
+When they cleared away the jam of human bodies from him he was
+exhausted. Four men pinioned his arms behind his back. Then he was
+dragged along the passage into the prison cell. They loosed him and
+threw him in. They bolted the door.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+At eleven minutes past three Gypo was condemned to death. The three
+judges went away, leaving Gallagher in charge of the execution of the
+sentence.
+
+At eighteen minutes past three Mulholland entered the inquiry room,
+with the three men who had been detailed to carry out the sentence
+passed on the prisoner. They stood to attention in front of the table
+at which Gallagher was sitting. Gallagher read to them the decision of
+the court. Then he gave them their orders.
+
+“Comrade Mulholland,” he said, “will be in charge. When I leave this
+room you will cast lots in the usual manner. You will then take the
+prisoner in the motor-van to any part of the mountain road, about
+half-way between Killakee and Glencree. There is bog on either side of
+the road. At any spot in that locality, you will be at least two miles
+from the nearest house. Execute the sentence there. Bury the body some
+distance from the road. Just drop it into a pool of bog water. When
+you have finished the job go straight ahead across the mountain to
+Enniskerry and come back to the city by another route. There are
+several. You can choose the most convenient. Report to me at
+head-quarters as soon as you come back, Bartly. I will wait for you
+there. Carry on, comrades. Get the prisoner away as quickly as
+possible. Use force if necessary to prevent him from creating a
+disturbance, but you must on no account execute the sentence until you
+get to the mountains.”
+
+Gallagher left the room. He went across the passage to the room where
+Mary McPhillip was sitting alone. All the armed men were gathered in
+the guardroom at the foot of the stairs. Tommy Connor had come in now.
+He was explaining something to them in a hoarse voice. Two men were
+stationed outside the door of the cell. The sentry paced up and down
+the passage again.
+
+Gallagher sat down on the wooden form beside Mary McPhillip. He did
+not look at her. He stared at the floor. His forehead twitched. His
+face was very drawn.
+
+“We have discovered the informer, Mary,” he said in a low voice. “Your
+brother will be shortly avenged. It was Gypo Nolan who betrayed him.”
+
+There was silence. Gallagher had uttered the last sentence
+dramatically, like a tremendous revelation. But Mary did not speak. He
+looked at her.
+
+“Mary,” he said again, a little louder. “It was Gypo Nolan who
+informed on your brother.”
+
+She shuddered and looked at him sadly in the gloom.
+
+“I knew that,” she said, “all along. Poor fellow.”
+
+“What?” he gasped, staring at her.
+
+“What are you going to do with him, Dan?” she asked, almost inaudibly.
+“I hope you’re not . . .” She stopped.
+
+Gallagher looked at her sharply, in wonder, suspiciously, as if he had
+suddenly proved to himself that all his calculations had been wrong
+about something.
+
+“Surely what, Mary?” he said at length, almost timorously.
+
+“You’re not going to kill him,” she said. “That would only be another
+murder, added to . . . to the other. It wouldn’t help the dead. Lord
+have mercy on him.”
+
+“Murder!” ejaculated Gallagher dreamily, as if he had heard the word
+for the first time in his life and he were reflecting on its
+significance, incredulously like a philosopher confronted unexpectedly
+by a stupendous superstition. Then his nostrils expanded and his face
+hardened into anger, as he realized her meaning and her attitude
+towards the sentence that was about to be passed on Gypo. “Murder, did
+you say? Great Scott! Do you call it murder to wipe out a serpent that
+has betrayed your brother? Where is your . . . ? Do you call yourself
+an Irishwoman? What? Good Lord! I don’t know what to make of it.
+What . . . ? Good Heavens!”
+
+“Listen to me, Dan,” she said, sobbing; “for God’s sake, listen to me
+before you do this. Listen. I didn’t know until now how awful it is. I
+was foolish the way I talked at home this evening when all the people
+were there. I was so mad the way father was talking that I thought I
+could shoot the man that informed on Frankie myself. But it would be
+murder, Dan, just the same as any other murder. And——”
+
+“Oh, hang it!” snapped Gallagher.
+
+“Dan,” she whispered, “don’t do it, for my sake. I love you. Don’t do
+it, for my sake and I’ll do anything you want me. I feel I’m the cause
+of this.”
+
+“Mary, do you love me?” whispered Gallagher excitedly, panting as he
+seized her right hand in both of his. He bent towards her. “Say it
+again. Say you love me.”
+
+But he drew back immediately, with a strange and unnatural presence of
+mind. He was afraid that the passing sentry might see him.
+
+Tears were rolling down Mary’s cheeks. She looked away towards the
+doorway. She kept silent. Gallagher leaned back from her, watching her
+face intently. He looked at her from under his bunched eyebrows. His
+lips were set firmly. His forehead convulsed. He appeared to be
+struggling with a savage passion and at the same time struggling to
+think coherently on the intellectual plane. He was trying to probe the
+movements of her mind so that he might conquer it with his mind. He
+wanted to conquer her mind and make her subject to him, to make her
+his mate on his own terms. He told himself that he was doing this, so
+that she might help him for the conquest of power. He refused to admit
+to himself that he was inspired by passion. He despised passion.
+
+The silence was very peculiar and tense. Mary was conscious of it. But
+Gallagher was not conscious of it. Then Mary spoke. She talked rapidly
+without looking at him. She talked in an irritated tone.
+
+“Take me out of this place immediately, Dan,” she said. “I was mad to
+come here with you. I had no business to come here atall. Also, if you
+were a gentleman you wouldn’t ask me to come. What I said just now
+about loving you was not true. I only said it trying to persuade you
+not to murder that man. Before, when I used to read in the papers
+about a man being shot, I used to think it was right, but it’s a
+different thing when a man you know does a thing like that. Frankie
+killed a man too, Lord have mercy on him. Oh, God, have pity on us
+all.” She became slightly hysterical. “Why can’t we have peace? Why
+must we be killing one another? Why——”
+
+“Hush! Keep quiet. Keep quiet.”
+
+“Isn’t it cruel, Dan?”
+
+She let her head fall on her hands. Her body shook with silent sobs.
+
+Gallagher stared at her dreamily.
+
+“I will let her alone now,” he thought. “The logical sequence of this
+outburst will be this. Her mind will wheel around to the other extreme
+if I keep quiet and don’t irritate her by attempting to convince her
+that I am right. Her terror and her moral excitement will exhaust
+themselves and go to sleep. Then she will become aware of her strange
+surroundings, mentally, in a different way. When her mind becomes
+awake and normally acute again, she will see me, this place and what’s
+going to be done with Gypo, in an opposite light. When her mind is
+groping about in this new attitude it will be easy for me to influence
+her. I think I’m right. At least it always held good, that rule. I
+remember the struggle I had with Sean Conroy. But women are supposed
+to be different from men a lot psychologically. But I have to chance
+that. It would be suicidal to interfere with her now. That’s certain.
+Still . . . I’m not sure of myself with her somehow. . . . It’s not
+like the others. And . . .”
+
+Again his passion surged upwards. He sat without thought, fighting it,
+squeezing his palms together, with his eyes on her bent neck.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+When Gallagher left the inquiry room, Mulholland went silently to a
+form and sat down. The three men stood nervously in front of the table
+watching him. They watched him intently, in silence, as if each
+movement he made was fraught with grave consequences to themselves.
+
+He took three matches from a box and placed them beside him on the
+form. He handled them slowly and deliberately, with a serious
+contemplative expression on his face, like an old fisherman baiting
+his hooks under the admiring glances of a party of tourists. Then he
+took out a clasp knife and opened it. He cut a piece off one match. He
+put the knife back into his pocket.
+
+Then, suddenly, he cleared his throat with a noise that sounded
+enormous in the silence. The three men started. They looked at one
+another fearfully, as if each had been caught by the others in the
+commission of an indecency.
+
+Mulholland rose calmly and approached them, holding the three matches
+on his open palm. Without speaking he pointed to them. Two long and
+one short. They all examined them. Right. Each nodded his head
+solemnly. Not a word. Mulholland nodded and marched away to the far
+end of the room. They did not follow him now with their eyes. They
+stared painfully at the floor.
+
+The tallest of them was a docker called Peter Hackett. He was a
+fair-haired young giant, slim and lean faced, with sleepy blue eyes
+and a gentle mouth. His great bony hands were thickly covered with
+long white hairs. He stood with his arms folded on his chest, one leg
+thrust forward, his eyes wide open and strained, his forehead
+wrinkled. He was only twenty-two. This was the first time he had been
+chosen for an affair of this sort. It was particularly strange and
+odious to him, because he was a good-natured soul, loved by all on the
+quays where he worked. He had no conception of politics or of any
+problem other than hurling, football, horse racing and pitch and toss,
+which he played all Sunday afternoon on the Canal bank with his
+cronies. He often lost his whole week’s wages playing pitch and toss.
+On these occasions, when he went home to his young wife penniless, he
+would first of all dance around the kitchen in a fit of rage and
+perhaps break a thing or two, threatening to blow Kitty’s brains out
+if she said a word. Then his anger would suddenly evaporate, to be
+followed by a fit of sobbing. During this fit he sat by the fire with
+his head in his hands, moaning and begging Kitty to forgive him. His
+wife always felt exalted when these outbursts occurred, because the
+excitement of the quarrel and Peter’s kisses, which lasted far into
+the night afterwards, were a welcome break in the dreary monotony of
+everyday life as a docker’s wife, scouring, cooking, washing, with two
+children to look after on a docker’s wages.
+
+Peter had no imagination. He lacked the refined conscience and sense
+of injustice that attracts most gentle natures like his towards a
+revolutionary movement. He was not the stuff of which the other sort
+of revolutionary is made either. He belonged to the Organization
+simply because the rest of “the boys” belonged to it, and out of
+fanatical hero-worship for Commandant Dan Gallagher.
+
+Dart Flynn, on the other hand, was designed by nature as a
+revolutionary, a man to stalk ahead of the bulk of humanity, grimly
+destroying obstacles, disturbing the sluggish existence of the herd,
+terrifying the contented ones into activity, born with a curse upon
+his brow, anathema to the mass of beings who always seek tranquillity
+and peace at any price. He was dour, dark visaged, built like the base
+of an oak tree, almost square. His body and face were fleshy and
+jealous of movement. His eyes were small. They moved horizontally. He
+was clean shaven, with a pink and white complexion, in spite of the
+fact that he was thirty-five and lived a hard life as a carter. In
+company, he hardly ever expressed an opinion on politics, religion, or
+on any other of the fundamental things that are discussed with avidity
+by revolutionaries who carry their lives in their hands. But in the
+secrecy of his own soul he thought deeply on these matters. In his
+little bare room in a lodging-house in Capel Street, he had several
+works on philosophy and economics. He had also worked out an amazing
+system of philosophy, based on the premise that each human being
+shares his soul with several different animals. The man who could
+discover and have constant intercourse with these animals would be
+supremely happy and immortal.
+
+Flynn had no moral sense. He hated all human beings who were not
+Communists. He loved all children and animals. He gave most of his
+wages to the hungry little ruffians in the street. He had no relatives
+or dependents. He was an old member of the Organization, highly
+respected for his courage, his fidelity and his taciturn habits.
+
+The third man, Laurence Curley, was of a totally different type from
+both his companions. He was also the most nervous and timorous. He was
+twenty-eight, pale faced, red haired, with a tall, thin frame,
+slightly consumptive-looking, on account of his hollow chest and
+stooping shoulders. His father had been a doctor in a country
+dispensary district. He had received a good education, but he early
+grew dissatisfied with life and refused to study for the Bar as his
+father wished. Instead he took a job in Dublin as a clerk, in order
+that he might plunge into the revolutionary movement.
+
+The theory of Revolutionary Communism interested him far more than
+working for a revolution. He gradually became a crank, hated by
+everybody. He was always finding fault and reading or discussing dull
+works on Socialism. His views were always the most extreme and
+blood-thirsty. He used to whisper excitedly, whenever he met a
+stranger who did not know him yet, or when the least industrial
+disturbance occurred:
+
+“The red flag will be hoisted any minute. Wait till you see. Then
+blood will spill. Wait till you see. Justice and liberty are bourgeois
+watchwords. The proletarian watchwords are revenge and bread. The
+proletariat knows how to deal out their deserts to the oppressors.”
+
+He had always this sort of patter.
+
+Now, however, the three of them, so different in essential
+characteristics, had reached a common level of emotion. The silence of
+the night, the phantom-filled cellars, the illegality and danger of
+the contemplated act, the torturing uncertainty of the choice, filled
+them with such delirious emotions that they were beside themselves.
+They were not afraid. They were beyond fear, on to a distant level of
+emotion, where the common impulses, that agitate the hearts of men,
+are unknown.
+
+Then Mulholland approached with the matches arranged in his hand, so
+that their red heads alone were visible.
+
+“Who’ll draw first?” he said carelessly, standing in front of the
+group.
+
+After a moment’s pause Flynn came forward hurriedly. He stretched out
+a fleshy hand, fumbled awkwardly with the matches and then pulled one.
+
+They all strained eagerly to look. It was a long match. Everybody
+sighed.
+
+“Next,” said Mulholland.
+
+Curley and Hackett looked at one another excitedly. Then each spoke.
+
+“You go first.”
+
+“No, you go first.”
+
+“Go ahead. I don’t mind drawing the last.”
+
+“What’s the difference? You’re nearest. Draw.”
+
+“Why should I? It’s your turn. You draw.”
+
+“Come on,” snarled Mulholland, “one of you draw. We have no time.”
+
+They both made a movement towards the matches. Then each stopped to
+let the other advance. Their hands and legs were jerky. They stared at
+one another with hatred.
+
+“Come on,” hissed Mulholland again. “Didn’t ye hear the Commandant’s
+orders, that we were to get outa the place as soon as possible? Are ye
+afraid or what?”
+
+“Oh no,” cried both men together in an off-hand tone.
+
+They both rushed at the matches. They tussled for them.
+
+“Keep back now. It’s my turn.”
+
+“Keep back, you. You weren’t so quick before. Let me draw.”
+
+“No, I won’t. I was here first.”
+
+“For goodness’ sake,” cried Mulholland, “ye pair o’ babies. Will I
+have to pull me gat on ye?”
+
+The two of them stood still, looking at Mulholland dazedly.
+
+“It’s against the rules,” continued Mulholland with a great sense of
+importance, “but I’m goin’ to call ye in the order o’ yer rank. You
+draw first, Comrade Curley.”
+
+Curley’s thin fingers shot out instantly. He drew the match. It was a
+long one. He gasped. Then he burst into a thin laugh.
+
+“Comrade Hackett.”
+
+Hackett stumbled forward. He reached for the short match that
+Mulholland held out to him with a strange smile.
+
+“It’s your shot, comrade,” whispered Mulholland.
+
+Hackett grasped the match and crushed it into fragments immediately.
+He threw the little bundle away in terror. He rubbed his palms slowly.
+Then he struck his right coat pocket suddenly with his hand. He
+laughed.
+
+“Good Lord!” he blubbered, “I thought I’d lost me penknife.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+For ten minutes Gypo lay perfectly still in the cell, after the door
+was bolted. He lay on his back. His head and neck were buttressed into
+an upright position by a square block of stone that jutted from the
+floor, by the wall farthest from the door. His feet were stretched
+out, wide apart. One hand lay on his right hip, palm upwards, with the
+fingers bent inwards, as if he had fallen asleep clawing something.
+The other hand lay across his eyes. He drew very deep breaths at long
+intervals. His face was perfectly at peace. It was bruised slightly
+around the mouth and on the cheek-bones. Each feature was impassive,
+like the features of a carved image. The glossy skin, the humps, the
+eyebrows that were like snouts, the thick Ethiopian lips, attained a
+majesty during that ten minutes of abnormal rest, a majesty that was
+not so apparent while they were in movement, responding to the strange
+impulses of his mind.
+
+Gypo rested, exhausted, while he was being condemned to death. It was
+a dead rest, like the rest of a child in the womb before birth,
+sucking strength all round for the savage struggle with life that will
+soon commence. Every organ and tissue and muscle was straining for a
+renewal of strength.
+
+When blundering reason flees, instinct, that is fundamental and
+unerring, rushes to the defence of life.
+
+At twelve minutes past three, one minute after he had been condemned
+to death, Gypo moved. He opened his eyes and closed the right hand
+that lay palm upwards on the ground. He clenched the hand rigidly
+until the wrist joint snapped with the tension. Then he took the other
+hand away from his eyes and dropped it to his bosom. He moved his eyes
+around from side to side, slowly, suspiciously, blinking and listening
+intently.
+
+The cell was pitch black. Only at one point was there a speck of
+light. There was a dim, oblong patch of light hanging slantwise in the
+darkness some distance to his left front. That was the aperture near
+the top of the door. It did not penetrate the darkness of the cell. It
+merely hung there, obscurely and uselessly, like a foolish suggestion.
+All round was pitch dark. Gypo shivered.
+
+He was not afraid. No. He did not feel at all in the ordinary sense of
+the word. But he was immediately fully conscious, as soon as he moved,
+of all that had happened before he had been thrown into the cell.
+Still more peculiar, he was quite calm and collected about everything.
+The darkness consoled him. He felt at home in it. It concealed him. He
+felt immensely big and strong in the darkness. There was nothing in
+his immediate neighbourhood but a darksome void that his personality
+overpowered. He could bellow and his voice would resound through that
+darkness indefinitely. There would be no resistance. There was no
+limit to the darkness, no wall, no horizon, no end. He was encompassed
+by it, sheathed in it. It wound round and round him. It was an
+impenetrable coat of mail, without weight, without thickness,
+intangible.
+
+Beyond it somewhere were his enemies. It came between him and them.
+Ha!
+
+He gathered himself up with a sudden spring. He got to his hands and
+knees. Several joints snapped as he did so. His bruised body had grown
+stiff, lying motionless on the stone floor. Just as he lay that way on
+his hands and knees, he heard a rattle at the door. Immediately he
+threw himself down again and pretended to be asleep. But he fell so
+that his eyes were toward the oblong patch of light. He knew what had
+rattled. It was the sentry having a look at him. An electric torch was
+thrust through the aperture. It rested on him for a moment or two.
+Then it was withdrawn.
+
+During the couple of moments that the torch-light had flooded the cell
+Gypo’s eyes were busy. They had darted around. Yes. The walls were
+hopeless. He knew that of course. He had himself guarded a prisoner in
+this same cell, a condemned prisoner whom he and McPhillip and Jem
+Linnet, the bookmaker’s clerk, had afterwards brought out in a car. He
+knew the whole routine. Perhaps that knowledge was responsible for his
+calm, partly responsible. Nothing was uncertain in the near future. In
+a few minutes they would come for him. Once in the car it would be
+impossible to escape.
+
+All right. His only chance was in the cell. Ha! That was why he was
+calm and collected. After all, it was neither the darkness nor his
+knowledge of what was destined to happen that made him calm. McPhillip
+had at last made a plan. The door . . . the door . . . the door!
+
+“Gypo,” he had said one night in Cassidy’s when he was drunk, “if we
+ever get . . . ye know what I mean, Gyp . . . click . . . you
+know . . . ye needn’t worry. I can manage that cell easy. Only I’d
+need you. I’m too small. Listen.”
+
+“I’ll do it, Frankie,” mumbled Gypo to himself excitedly, as he
+crawled along the floor towards the door.
+
+He moved like a bear on his hands and knees, with his head down and
+his haunches high in the air. He moved noiselessly until he reached
+the door. He felt along the edge of the wall and then drew himself
+gradually to his feet. For a moment he toyed with the idea of taking
+off his boots, but he could not remember that Frankie had said
+anything about that. He decided to leave them on. He reached up with
+his hands. He strained them to their full length before he reached the
+top of the stone ledge over the door.
+
+Drawing a deep breath he hoisted up his body, using his biceps as
+levers. . . . His biceps swelled and knotted and snapped. . . . His
+body rose smartly and without apparent effort. In an amazing way he
+swung around his legs from the hips and landed his body gently on the
+ledge, resting on the right side of his chest and stomach. The stone
+ledge was no more than six inches wide. More than half his body rested
+on the empty air, as it lay along the ledge. But he was as cool as if
+he were standing loosely on the broad, firm earth. He was acting on
+the plan he and McPhillip had rehearsed. His body performed the
+movements without his mind exercising any control, either of guidance
+or of warning, warning against danger that is called fear.
+
+After a slight pause, he leaned his weight on his hands and rolled his
+body around in a reckless movement. His legs shot into the air about
+two feet. He stood poised on his hands for two seconds, as if he were
+going to stand on his head. Then he lowered his right leg. He brought
+it up to his hands. Slowly, with snapping gasps, he balanced himself
+on the right leg and stood up straight.
+
+He stood straight in the solid darkness for a moment. He breathed
+twice rapidly. Then he groped upwards for the roof. He found it about
+three inches above his head. He pawed the stones hurriedly, searching.
+He couldn’t find what he wanted. It should be there. Mother of Mercy!
+He pawed out farther. Nothing yet. Sweat stood out on his forehead,
+suddenly, as if his body had been wrung. Savage anger gained control
+of him. He bared his lips and distended his eyes. His last hope gone?
+Had they taken it away during the last six months? He reached out one
+inch farther. Too far.
+
+With a muffled gasp, he hurtled forward from the ledge. His hands
+scraped along the roof with a rasping sound. Then, just as they fell
+in pursuit of the falling body, the fingers of the right hand closed
+on an iron ring. They closed on it like a vice. The shoulder muscles
+snapped. Gypo swung across the floor, brought up with a grunt, jerked
+and swung back again, suspended from the iron ring by his right hand.
+
+When he steadied himself, he changed hands on the ring and groped
+about with his right hand, until he found a hole in the roof about
+three inches away from the ring. That was the hole of the trap-door,
+through which the wine had been let down into the cellar from the
+garden. He gripped the ring with both hands and swung up with his
+legs, until they found the far side of the hole. He jammed both feet
+against the side of the hole and rested for four seconds, breathing
+deeply. His knees were bent upwards.
+
+He reached up into the hole with his right foot. The foot reached the
+oaken door that lay across the mouth. It had been fastened with
+leather hinges, but these had worn away and they had not been renewed
+since the house became deserted. Several inches of earth had collected
+on it. Gypo pushed against it and made no impression on this mass of
+earth and rubbish that covered it. He took another rest and then
+pushed with all his might. He raised it suddenly, with a sucking
+sound, about three inches. A mass of dirt and earth fell down with a
+swish. It landed on the floor beneath with a showery thud. The noise
+terrified Gypo. The sentries outside the door would hear it.
+
+In a furious rage, he kicked with all his might and sent the door
+flying away from the hole. A whole load of earth fell with a rush and
+a gust of cold night air came with it, with equal rapidity,
+ferociously, as if it had been waiting a long time to attack.
+
+In spite of the blinding dirt and the freezing air, Gypo stuck his
+legs through the hole immediately and clutched the garden surface with
+his heels. Then he let go one hand off the ring and gripped the side
+of the hole. He hurt his collar-bone badly as he did so. Now his body
+was secure in the hole. He let go the other hand, supporting himself
+on the thigh muscles that gripped the sides of the hole until the
+second hand and his head came into the hole. Then he scrambled through
+on to the garden. He bounded to his feet and hurtled forward on his
+face.
+
+Two shots had thundered through the hole as he cleared it. They were
+after him. He snorted with fright. For a moment he stood still,
+confused by the din of voices and the rushing feet. Then he darted
+away headlong through the rubbish towards the house, ten yards away.
+His only escape lay that way. He entered the house at a bound, through
+a hole in the kitchen wall. He cleared the kitchen in two strides. He
+was in the hallway. Flash, flash, bang, bang. Two more shots. His fist
+floored a tall man. He rammed a second with his head. He floundered
+through the hall. Bang, bang. They whizzed closely past his right
+side. He slipped on the flags of the hall as he tried to wheel towards
+the right wall. He came to his hands and knees. As he rose again a man
+threw himself upon him, firing as he did so, so closely that Gypo
+smelt the explosion that flashed blindingly by his ear. Missed again.
+They closed, grappling one another’s bodies, with groping, shifting
+paws. They tumbled in the doorway. They both rose. Gypo loosed one arm
+and struck. The other man collapsed without a sound. Gypo dropped him.
+He fell on his back. It was the Dart Flynn.
+
+Gypo grunted, bounded to his feet and wheeled to the right, into the
+open air. With a gurgling laugh, he bounded away into the darkness. He
+was away, swallowed by the night.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+When Gallagher heard the first shot, he started to his feet angrily.
+He thought that his orders had been disobeyed and that they had shot
+the prisoner before taking him to the mountains. But even as he stood
+up, his anger changed to terror. He heard the rushing of feet and the
+babble of shouting voices, calling excitedly, in a panic:
+
+“He’s escaped. He’s escaped.”
+
+“The stairs. The stairs. Up the stairs, quick.”
+
+Mary McPhillip screamed. Gallagher did not heed her. For three seconds
+his body was numbed with fear. He could not move a muscle. His lips
+blubbered. He was like an exhausted man about to have a heart attack.
+He stood unstably, like an uprooted tree, balancing for its fall. Mary
+jumped up and clung to him. He did not look at her. Then Mulholland
+rushed in. He was livid with fear.
+
+“He’s escaped, Commandant,” he gasped; “he’s gone.”
+
+Then Gallagher shook himself violently, thrusting Mary from him
+rudely. Uttering a volley of almost inarticulate oaths, he drew his
+pistol and grasped Mulholland by the throat. Mulholland yelled and
+struggled downwards to his knees.
+
+“Don’t shoot me, Commandant,” he whined. “It wasn’t my fault. That man
+is a devil out of hell. There’s a spell on him. Don’t fire for the
+love of God.”
+
+“Damn you and God,” snarled Gallagher, hurling him away.
+
+He rushed out into the hall.
+
+“After him,” he yelled. “After him. After him.”
+
+There was nobody to take any notice of him. Everybody was on the
+street in pursuit of Gypo, except the sentry, who stood uncertainly in
+the doorway of the empty cell, with his pistol in his hand and his cap
+turned backwards, terrified, gaping at Gallagher.
+
+Then a rush of feet came on the stairs. Four men were coming down
+carrying Flynn between them.
+
+“Who is that?” cried Gallagher.
+
+“It’s Flynn, Commandant,” whispered one.
+
+“His jaw is broken in a jelly,” whispered another.
+
+They arrived at the bottom of the stairs. Gallagher glanced at the
+prostrate, sagging body of Flynn. “Throw him in there on a form at
+once,” he said. “Mulholland. Come here. Where are those others?”
+
+“Here they come, Commandant.”
+
+“There’s no sight of him, Commandant,” gasped Tommy Connor, leaping
+down the stairs. “We thought we had better come back.”
+
+“All right,” said Gallagher. “Are you all here now?”
+
+He spoke in a terribly calm voice now. It was terrifying. Nobody
+answered for a moment.
+
+“Hurry on, Peter,” said Connor to somebody that appeared at the top of
+the stairs.
+
+It was Hackett. He rushed down, panting, with wild eyes. They were all
+back again.
+
+“Who’s responsible for this?” cried Gallagher.
+
+Nobody answered. He swore and strode away down the passage to the
+cell. Connor and Mulholland followed him. The others stood spellbound.
+Gallagher pushed the sentry out of the way with a curse and entered
+the cell. He flashed his torch. He saw everything. A cold perspiration
+started gently around his temples. He shivered. He left the cell
+followed by the two men. Nobody spoke. They returned to the men at the
+foot of the stairway. As Connor passed the room where Mary McPhillip
+was, he ran in, picked her up from the floor and put her sitting on
+the form. Then he rushed away to Gallagher.
+
+Gallagher stood looking at the ground for a few moments, with the men
+standing around him in silence. Then he looked around fiercely at
+every one. He spoke gently and in a friendly tone.
+
+“Comrades,” he said, “our lives are at stake. What’s more,
+the Organization is in danger. The cause is in danger.
+Comrades,—that—man—must—be—found. That man must be found if it costs a
+hundred men. Do you understand?”
+
+“Yes, Commandant,” cried they all eagerly.
+
+“Finnigan and Murphy stay here on guard. Do you hear?”
+
+They clicked their heels in silence.
+
+“Mulholland, you take the rest with you in the van and try and cut him
+off from the bridges. He will try and cross the river to the south to
+get away to the mountains. Get away immediately. Place your men and
+take up position yourself at the Butt Bridge. I’ll send reinforcements
+to you there and another officer. Slattery, you get reinforcements.
+Mobilize ten men from this district. Take them off your own list. Beat
+it. Quick. Off you go, Bartly. Remember the Cause is at stake. We are
+lost if that man gets away. He may be making for the police already.
+Run for your lives.”
+
+They went up the stairs, rushing with fanatical enthusiasm. In three
+seconds Gallagher was alone at the foot of the stairs. One sentry took
+up position at the top of the stairway. The other man went into the
+guardroom with Flynn. Mary McPhillip was standing in the doorway of
+the witnesses’ room, shivering, almost hysterical with fright.
+
+Gallagher stood for almost a minute, motionless, looking at the
+stairs, with his eyes almost shut. Then he shuddered and went into the
+guardroom. The sentry, a red-faced, young grocer’s assistant, was
+tying a red silk handkerchief around Flynn’s jaws. The only part of
+Flynn’s face that was visible was his eyes. Gallagher watched the
+sentry tying the knot at the back of Flynn’s skull. Then he looked
+into Flynn’s eyes.
+
+Flynn stared back coldly. Although he was suffering agonies of pain
+from his broken jaw, his eyes betrayed no sign of pain.
+
+“Did you fire at him, Dart?” cried Gallagher in a whisper.
+
+Flynn made a slight nodding movement.
+
+“Did you hit him?”
+
+Flynn raised his right hand and waved it from side to side, like a
+marker giving the signal for a washout. Gallagher sighed.
+
+“Stick it out,” he said coldly. “We’ll get a doctor as soon as the
+reinforcements come. Can you swallow a drop of brandy?”
+
+Flynn nodded.
+
+“Here’s my flask. Use it.”
+
+He put the flask into Flynn’s hand. He pressed the hand as he did so.
+Then he left the guardroom and walked over to Mary McPhillip.
+
+She left the doorway when she saw him coming. He found her sitting on
+the form. He stood beside her, looking at the ground, wrapt in
+thought, gripping her shoulder with his right hand. She became
+terrified at his attitude, at his silence and the look on his face,
+which she could see dimly in the gloom. His face had become ashen
+pale. His eyes had sunk and grown glassy. The blood had left his lips.
+He was continually grinding his back teeth, slowly.
+
+“Dan,” she whispered at length, “what’s the matter with you?”
+
+He did not answer for several seconds. Then he started, gasped, and
+let go her shoulder. He took two paces rapidly towards the door. He
+halted and put his hand to his forehead. He wheeled about and looked
+at her curiously.
+
+“Oh yes,” he said calmly. “I forgot. Excuse me. I was thinking of
+something and I didn’t hear what you said. Let me see. Yes.”
+
+He sat down beside her. He took her right hand gently into both his
+own and began to fondle it, with the soft gentle movements of a cat.
+He began to speak gently, in a soft, sad voice, looking at the floor
+in front of him.
+
+“You’ll have to stay here with me now, Mary,” he said, “until I’m
+leaving here. Maybe we’ll have to stay here two hours, maybe more.
+Gypo has escaped. I can’t move until I get news of him. The prisoner
+has escaped,” he repeated almost inaudibly. “If he can’t be found it
+will be the end of me, Mary. He knows so much.”
+
+Mary turned towards him eagerly and swallowed her breath. Her eyes
+grew moist and her lips quivered. The gentle tone of his voice went
+straight to her heart. It drew her towards him, not with the dreadful
+fascination with which she was drawn towards him before, but with a
+soft, gentle attraction, like what she had imagined love would be. Not
+the calm, calculating, respectable affection she experienced for the
+man she intended to marry, Joseph Augustine Short, but that
+tumultuous, devouring passion which she had expected real love to be,
+the love that was written of in books and poems. Ah! How she could
+love him like this! Soft and gentle like this! She could approach him
+and touch him, touch something in him that was soft and gentle and
+sympathetic and human. He was in danger. Good God! It was good that he
+was in danger, if it helped to disclose to her his real self. It had
+made him weak, this danger, ridding him of the horrid, impenetrable
+strength, that kept him cruel and cold. If she could have him to
+herself like this, she would sacrifice even her religion for his love.
+Aye! She would even forsake God for him like this.
+
+So she thought, looking at him with tears in her eyes.
+
+She smoothed his shoulder gently with her hand and whispered to him:
+
+“Dan,” she said, “you are in danger. Can I help you, Dan? Dan, you
+know I’d give my life for you.”
+
+Gallagher turned towards her slowly.
+
+“You would, Mary,” he said softly.
+
+She nodded. He took her suddenly in his arms.
+
+“You love me, Mary. Say you love me, Mary.”
+
+“I love you, Dan,” she breathed on his lips.
+
+They kissed passionately, with strange abandonment. Then they sat for
+a minute, with their cheeks together, hardly conscious of anything but
+of a strange exaltation that was undefinable. A hot feeling of joyous
+exaltation pervaded their bodies. But it was not the exaltation of
+love. It was an abandoned sadness born of grief. The grief of two
+human souls clinging together for solace. It was beautiful and pure
+like love, that exaltation, born of fear, and of the eternal
+melancholy of the entramelled Irish soul, struggling in bondage.
+
+For Mary perhaps, it was almost pure mating love. For she loved that
+gentle voice, the last remnant of the gentle nature, that had been
+devoured in the struggle of life and replaced by a cold, callous,
+ambitious nature. She loved, but she only loved a phantom, a shy ghost
+come for an hour of the night, to fly from the dawn.
+
+But for Gallagher, his caresses were a mask. He had hidden behind his
+gentle nature for the moment, as behind a mask, to rest and plot. Men
+like him always lean on women for support in moments of extreme
+danger.
+
+Even as he sat with her arms about him, with her breathing words of
+love on his lips, he was thinking, not of her, but of the great danger
+that confronted him. Would Gypo inform again before he was caught?
+
+At length, with a low exclamation he got to his feet, releasing
+himself hurriedly from her embrace. He clenched his fists.
+
+“Mary,” he said without looking at her, “you see how I need you. I
+need somebody to talk to, somebody to trust. There is nobody else but
+you I can trust, Mary. And I don’t know why I trust you.”
+
+He paused. She was not listening. She was suffering a reaction from
+her exaltation. Why was he talking like this? A lover did not talk
+like this. He was only thinking of himself.
+
+“But since the first time I saw you, standing in the crowd with
+another girl, while I was addressing a strike meeting, I knew I could
+trust you. I remember thinking as I saw your face, that you were the
+woman for me. It was queer and I can’t explain it. Something in your
+face told me that you were my woman. It’s very queer, that. You see
+thousands of faces every day. There is something queer and mysterious
+in them all, something suspicious and hostile. Then you see one face
+that you have been looking for all your life as it were. There is
+nothing hidden or mysterious in that face. It can hold nothing hidden
+from you. It’s queer. I haven’t worked it out yet. It’s in the eyes, I
+think. The eyes are the doors of the mind. But I haven’t worked it out
+yet. But what am I talking about? It’s a sure sign that I’m worried
+when I ramble off like this. I talk to myself in my room, for want of
+a listener, when I’m up against it. I talk all night, sitting up in
+bed, with a pistol in my hand.” He lowered his voice and smiled with
+his lips, while his eyes glittered. He looked at her for a moment. “If
+the boys knew that I get the wind up now and again, they wouldn’t be
+afraid of me. And then. . . .” He drew his hand across his windpipe.
+“Sure. That’s what keeps me safe. They are afraid of me. That’s all it
+is. It’s not love. Oh no. I wouldn’t have it, anyway. There’s nothing
+like fear. Nobody loves me. Not even that slobber of a fellow Hackett,
+who stooped down one day on the quays to tie my shoelace. He’d die for
+me, but only because he believes I’m cold and hard and callous and
+that I could shoot him dead without a quiver of an eyelid. You
+see . . . he’s the opposite from . . . There you are, Mary. Good God!
+I must be very bad to-night. I’m wandering. Mary, does your right knee
+tremble and you can’t stop it?”
+
+“Dan, Dan,” cried Mary, seizing his right knee in both her hands,
+“don’t worry. Don’t worry, Dan.” She began to rub the knee. “That’s
+nothing. My father often gets it. It’s only nerve tension. A nurse out
+of the Mater Hospital told me all about it. You can live to be a
+hundred with it. She says it’s due to tea drinking. But . . . Dan, why
+are you so hard and cynical all of a sudden about everything? Can’t
+you give it all up and settle down? You said you——”
+
+“Settle down?” cried Gallagher, jumping to his feet and looking at her
+fiercely, as if she had suggested a heinous crime. “Give it up! How do
+you mean? Pooh! Women, women, women! You don’t understand that it’s my
+life. It’s my life, I say. You might as well tell me stop breathing
+and . . . After all . . .” He seemed to think of something startlingly
+unexpected, for he looked at her with open lips. He continued, shyly
+almost, in a scarcely audible voice, as if he were soliloquizing.
+“After all, you weren’t affected the way I expected you would be. You
+would never understand. You would never join me in the way . . . Hm! I
+see.”
+
+“Now what have I said, Dan?” she whispered nervously, biting her
+fingers.
+
+She was terrified that she had lost him . . . yes, in a way, strangely
+enough, she was terrified at losing his love, as if she had him
+securely in her possession, as a loving husband for a long time . . .
+that she had lost him by some foolish phrase.
+
+“Nothing,” he muttered solidly.
+
+He crossed his hands on his chest and began to pace up and down once
+more. It was a long time until he spoke. She tried to get enraged with
+him and could not do so. She began to pity herself.
+
+“It’s waiting like this that’s hard,” he said suddenly in a whisper.
+“I don’t mind dying. It’s not that I mind. It’s waiting without a
+chance of knowing what’s going to happen. They talk of the bravery of
+those louts that get the V.C. What are they but stupid carrot heads?
+Theirs is the bravery of the dull-witted ox. A man must be intelligent
+to be brave. It’s only the intelligent man that can visualize danger.
+If he is brave he never seeks danger, but he seeks dangerous methods
+of life. You see the difference? Well, it doesn’t matter anyway. I had
+this all worked out a long time ago so I don’t need to discuss it very
+much. But this is the point I have to explain now. There is no danger
+in open warfare. There’s merely death, and death is not dangerous. The
+Russians proved that. Not recently, but in Bielinsky’s time. That is,
+of course, they proved it in relation to their own needs. But
+according to my own calculations and discoveries, death brings us back
+into the great consciousness of the Universe, which is eternal.
+Therefore death, properly speaking, is not death. It is a second stage
+of birth. No, that’s quite wrong. I can see where that would lead me.
+There is neither birth nor death. But . . . All that’s out of the
+count. We have to tackle a minor question. Obviously it’s a minor
+question. Now that’s better. Now we see death is not a danger. But
+defeat is a danger. Defeat by one’s enemies. Not defeat by one’s
+friends. But of course there are no friends. Friends is a bourgeois
+word. It has no longer any meaning. So defeat in the true sense means
+defeat by one’s enemies. It’s synonymous. Well, I face defeat.
+Therefore. . . .” Suddenly he waved his right hand in a circular
+fashion above his head and then pointed it fiercely at the wall to his
+left. “It’s waiting like this that’s hard,” he cried fiercely. “I’ve
+been out with a gun many a time. I’ve been shot at. I have two holes
+in me. That’s nothing. You don’t know what’s happening because you
+become an animal. But waiting is different. You are in command. That’s
+different. A brain, a mind, a great eye, probing the unknown.
+But . . .” He stopped suddenly and tittered audibly in his throat.
+
+“Jesus, Mary and Joseph protect me,” Mary began to murmur rapidly to
+herself. She shut her eyes and tried to think of Heaven. Her mind had
+suddenly become void of all sense of knowledge and emotion. She felt
+an intense cold in every pore of her flesh. As she rambled through the
+prayer over and over again with her lips, a ridiculous rigmarole of a
+song went through her mind with a tintillating sound, about, “Piping
+Tim of Galway.”
+
+He sat down beside her on the form, bent towards her and kissed her
+coldly on the forehead. His cold lips remained on her forehead for
+three seconds. Then he sighed and got to his feet again. He must keep
+in movement. He must keep talking. He could not stop his brain from
+thinking at an enormous rate and the only way to relieve the
+congestion was by talking aloud. The formation and enunciation of the
+words deflected a fraction of the brain forces and liquidated them.
+Faster, faster, wilder, wilder he must talk, to keep pace with the
+tremendous speed of his heated brain.
+
+“Where is he now?” he whispered with a kind of cackle in his throat
+that was like a laugh. “Where is he now? Why can’t we see with the
+mind, long distances? How very stupid I am after all in spite of my
+philosophy. He might be in the police station at this very moment,
+with a big, fat sergeant taking down his statement.” He shuddered and
+bit his lip. “Good Lord Mary! If you only knew what a statement he
+could make. Ha! ha! He and Francis are the only two men in the
+Organization who could tell anything worth while. And Francis is
+dead.”
+
+He paused. Mary bit her teeth, dispelled the tintillating rigmarole of
+a song and began another prayer, one to Our Lady of Perpetual Succour.
+
+“Ye see, Gypo was so useful. There were things he could do that no
+other man could do. Not so much by his immense strength, as on account
+of his particular mental qualities. It’s easy to get as strong a man,
+but a mind like that is hard to find. I doubt if there is another. He
+was priceless. Damn him. He’s a superhuman monster. Why did I say
+_was_ before? He is. _He is._ That’s the worst of it. I wish he . . .
+The government would give a million pounds for that statement. Good
+Lord! I never thought Gypo could turn informer. It must have been a
+mistake. I couldn’t be wrong about him. Some mistake. Sure. He isn’t
+the type. Sure. I swear he isn’t. How could he be? He responds to me
+like, like a needle to a magnet. Then how did he inform? On his own
+pal too! That’s the strange thing about it. I’ve been studying him for
+eight years and he never showed any signs of personal initiative.
+Never once. I shouldn’t have dropped him for six months. But of course
+I had to keep up respect for the rules of the Organization. Good
+Lord!” he cried pathetically, looking at the ceiling and wringing his
+hands almost in despair, “I’m alone with nobody to help me. Mary,
+there’s nobody to give me advice. Why did nobody warn me against
+expelling Gypo? What?”
+
+He paused. She did not reply. She shuddered and did not look. It was
+difficult to pray. She was so tired. And it was terrifying not to
+pray. Then she might have to listen to him.
+
+Then suddenly she was startled into an upright position, with her eyes
+staring and her mouth wide open. Gallagher had uttered a strange
+sound. Then he ran crouching to the form. He hurled himself upon it.
+He clutched at her knees. He was looking with wild, strained eyes at a
+point on the wall. He jabbered in a dry parched voice.
+
+“There he is, Mary. I see him. I see him. I see the sergeant writing
+it down. They are giving him a drink. D’ye see him, Mary, with his
+little hat perched at the back of his head, making the statement? D’ye
+hear him say my name? D’ye hear him?”
+
+She drew his head towards her with both hands, trying to make him look
+at her face, trying to get his staring eyes away from the wall, but he
+struggled against her. His eyes were fixed wildly on some point in the
+wall. He writhed.
+
+Then suddenly he sighed, turned towards her and smiled. It was a
+natural, healthy smile. His eyes danced humorously as he smiled. His
+terror had passed away, giving place to a momentary joy. He felt
+hilarious, like a woman drunk with wine. He took Mary suddenly into
+his arms and kissed her. He tickled her neck playfully with his
+fingers, laughing all the time.
+
+But she struggled to free herself, panting. He loosed her and stopped
+laughing, looking at her in surprise.
+
+“Did I frighten you, Mary?” he said casually. “That’s all right. I
+often get a fit of the blues like that. Don’t worry. Did you think I
+was mad?” he added with a little laugh.
+
+“Oh, you’re all right now, Dan, ha, ha.”
+
+She was trying to laugh to cheer herself, but she made a poor job of
+it.
+
+“Sure I am, Mary. As right as rain. Everything will be all right. Of
+course it will. Don’t worry.”
+
+There was a long silence. They sat close together, looking at the
+ground.
+
+“Tell me, Dan,” whispered Mary awkwardly, “did you see anything that
+time? When you were looking at the wall? Did you see anything? Tell
+me, quick. It’s such a queer place, this. I think there are devils in
+it.”
+
+“Damn it!” snapped Gallagher. “Why did you bring the subject up again,
+when I want to forget it? Devils! Huh! Devils!”
+
+He jumped to his feet and took two paces forward, stretching his hands
+out over his head with peculiar intensity, like a man with a rheumatic
+twinge in his shoulder blades. Then he shrugged himself and rattled
+off with startling suddenness, in a quite calm voice, cheerful and
+debonair.
+
+“You are right,” he said, “after all, in asking the question. I should
+have explained at the time,” he yawned, “what I meant by seeing him.
+Of course I was speaking figuratively. There are no such things as
+devils, at least not supernatural creations, as the current
+superstition understands them to be. The only devils to be afraid of
+are human devils. I know numbers of them. They are real enough. But
+they wear sheep’s clothing. Respectable, law-abiding fellows. I’ll see
+them again in a few hours, if Gypo gets to the police station with his
+story. They’ll drawl out slowly their sentence on me. Ha! Pretty boys.
+And here I am doing nothing while they are . . .”
+
+He moved rapidly up and down again, clutching his hands behind his
+back, jerking his body about and crunching his teeth.
+
+“I am alone,” he continued. “Alone. I stand alone. They can easily buy
+off the rest of the Executive Committee. They’ll be only too glad to
+get away free, with their lives, at any cost, if it comes to a fight.
+If evidence is found against me, sufficient to prove certain things,
+they can strike at me with impunity. My own rank and file would be the
+first to stone me to death. Their damn superstitions always stand in
+the way of revolutionary beliefs. They talk at International
+Head-quarters about romanticism and leftism and all sorts of freak
+notions. What do they know about the peculiar type of hog mind that
+constitutes an Irish peasant?”
+
+“How dare you?” cried Mary indignantly.
+
+He looked at her. Her eyes were flashing. She sat erect on the form.
+He had never seen a woman wild and imperious like that. He smiled
+weakly.
+
+“Sorry to hurt your feelings,” he said cynically. “But I’m beyond
+that. Pish! I’ve got the whole country in a fine net and I’m within
+the law until they find something definite to go upon. I can snap my
+fingers at the lot of you.” He grew fierce and arrogant. “You and your
+patriotic ideas! I was wrong about you. I don’t want you. I never
+wanted you. Do you hear? I snap my fingers at the whole world. That
+hulking swine can do his best. I will drain his blood before dawn.
+Mark my words. He’ll never reach the police station. My destiny stands
+against him. And——”
+
+Just then the sentry’s challenge rang out. Gallagher immediately stood
+stock still and listened. Then he rushed into the passage, drawing his
+pistol and muttering something. Two men were hurrying down the stairs.
+The first of them came up smartly to Gallagher and clicked his heels.
+
+He was a small, slight man, with hawk’s eyes and a long, pointed,
+curved nose. He wore a loose raincoat and a check cap. He was Billy
+Burton, an Insurance Agent, a captain in the Revolutionary
+Organization. Gallagher shook hands with him eagerly.
+
+“Glad they found you in, Billy,” he said. “You’re the very man I
+want.”
+
+He led Burton into the guardroom and rapidly explained the situation.
+Then he detailed a plan. He detailed the plan coolly and minutely as
+if he had spent weeks at it.
+
+Burton listened, blinking his little eyes, sniffing, biting his nails,
+fondling the butt of his automatic pistol in his breast pocket.
+
+Over on the form, Flynn was sitting, with his broken jaw swathed in a
+red silk handkerchief. He sat impassively, inscrutably communing with
+himself. He seemed to be unconscious of his surroundings, with his
+mind fixed immutably on some infinite problem.
+
+The only sounds in the room were the drip, drip of the water from the
+many roofs and the patter of Gallagher’s voice.
+
+His voice was again cold, hard, dominating, vital.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+At a quarter to four the drizzling rain ceased. A sharp bustling wind
+arose. It came screaming down from the mountains upon Dublin. It was a
+hard, mountainous wind, a lean, sulky, snowy wind, that rushed through
+the sleeping city savagely, so that even the drops of rain on the
+muddy sidewalks leaned over before it, with frills on them.
+
+The clouds arose, their hanging rumps cut away by the newborn wind.
+They hung high up in the heavens, gashed and torn, with a sour
+expression on their grey, slattern bodies. Here and there a rent came
+in the dishevelled panorama of cloud and the sky appeared, blue and
+chaste and a long way off.
+
+This change in the mood of nature occurred when Gypo was bounding away
+from the Bogey Hole, trembling shakily with excess of energy. He ran
+through a short, narrow lane, so narrow that his shoulders grazed
+either side as he dashed through. He crossed a thoroughfare in four
+strides, casting a look on either side as he leaped across. He saw a
+sloppy roadway on one side, with a watchman’s glowing brazier at the
+far end and on the other side a hill. Tall tenement houses lined the
+thoroughfare, their battered old walls rambling up towards the sky,
+their squalor hidden by the majesty of the night.
+
+He fled across the road and entered a dark archway. Then he bumped
+suddenly against an old cart and went head-over-heels with a smothered
+exclamation. The concussion and weight of his body propelled the cart
+a distance of three yards on its crazy wheels, with the shafts
+scraping along the ground. He struggled to his feet and was about to
+rush away again, when a human voice, coming from beneath him, made him
+stand still. He looked down fiercely. It was only some homeless
+derelict, who used the archway and the cart as a house and a bed.
+
+“The curse of—” began a cracked, shivering voice.
+
+Gypo was gone, with a clatter of boots, over the cobblestones of the
+archway. He debouched into a wide street of new, red-brick houses. He
+gripped a wall and peered around him, panting for breath, wild with
+the excitement of his escape.
+
+It was then that he noticed the wind, the lifting clouds, and the
+far-away sky. He smelt the wind as he breathed in great gasps through
+his nostrils, to ease the pressure on his heart and lungs. Then
+suddenly, he longed for the mountains and the wide undulating plains
+and the rocky passes and the swift-flowing rivers, away to the south
+in his own country. Freedom and solitude and quiet, with only the wind
+coming through the bog heather! Hiding in some rocky fastness of the
+mountains, listening to the wind! Away, away, where nobody could catch
+him! To the mountains! To the mountains! Dark blue mountains with
+bulging sides and little sheep roaming over them, that he could catch
+and kill!
+
+A wild ferocity of joy overcame him. He stared with dilated nostrils
+ahead into the rim of the sky above the houses, towards the south. He
+gazed, as if he were measuring the distance between him and the
+mountains, so as to take a giant leap, that would carry him at once
+into the heart of their solitude.
+
+Then he bent down, looking ahead intently. He spat on his hands. He
+put his hand to his head to settle his hat. But his hat was not there.
+His skull was bare and damp. He felt all over it and found a patch of
+clotted blood at the rear base, where it had been kicked during the
+struggle in the inquiry room. He took no notice of the blood, but kept
+feeling all over the skull, with a dazed look in his eyes, muttering:
+
+“What am I to do without a hat? I had it this two years.”
+
+In the same dazed way he felt all over his body. He uttered a little
+shout. He had found it in his trousers pocket, where he had stuffed
+it, during the inquiry, when he heard that ominous ring in Gallagher’s
+voice. He clapped it on to his skull, all wrinkled and tattered and
+tiny. He beat it with his palms, as if it were a mattress. Then, with
+a gentle sigh, he darted away, headed due south for the mountains.
+
+He ran recklessly, without thinking of the way, or taking any
+precautions. It was the slum district which he knew so well, the
+district that enclosed Titt Street, the brothels, the Bogey Hole,
+tenement houses, churches, pawnshops, public-houses, ruins, filth,
+crime, beautiful women, resplendent idealism in damp cellars, saints
+starving in garrets, the most lurid examples of debauchery and vice,
+all living thigh to thigh, breast to breast, in that fœtid morass on
+the north bank of the Liffey. He ran through narrow streets and great,
+wide, yawning streets, lanes and archways, streets patched and
+buttressed, with banks of earth from fallen houses almost damming them
+in places, pavements strewn with offal, soddened by the rain.
+
+He never made a mistake. He was headed for the mountains. The smell of
+the mountains was in his nostrils, flooding his lungs, making his
+heart pant with longing.
+
+At last he entered Beresford Place and saw the river. Instinctively he
+paused, leaning against a wall, to examine the Bridge. He gasped and
+trembled.
+
+Two men were standing at the near side of the Butt Bridge. They had
+already forestalled him. He listened. He toyed with a last hope. He
+moved cautiously across the open space, to reach the shelter of the
+ruins of the Custom House. He reached it. He peered closer at the men.
+They were still indistinct. After all, they might be robbers, workmen,
+homeless fellows trying to pass the night, students coming from the
+brothels and having a last drunken argument on their way home. He
+crawled nearer. Then his little eyes blinked and narrowed.
+
+One of the men crouched against the biting wind. Gypo recognized the
+crouching figure silhouetted against the sky. It was Mulholland. And
+the other man, standing stiff, with his hands in his pockets, was
+Peter Hackett.
+
+Gypo’s head became hot and stuffy. His eyes closed, as a sudden pain
+struck him in the forehead. He had an impulse to rush forward at the
+two men and strangle them. But he did not move. He was not afraid of
+the two of them, in spite of their being armed. He did not fear their
+guns. But they were part of the Organization. The Organization was at
+the Bridge. It had got there before him. He could not pass.
+Gallagher’s cold, glassy eyes were on the Bridge. He could not pass.
+
+The smell of the mountains left his lungs and his nostrils. The wind
+still blew about his crouching body. But it had lost its odour. Now it
+was only sharp and biting, an enemy that drove him backwards, skulking
+and dumbfounded. Where was it driving him? Where was it driving him?
+
+He crouched away before it, without taking counsel with himself, with
+his head hanging limply on his breast. He crouched across the open
+space and entered a roadway that led northwards. There was nothing
+within him with which he could take counsel. Within him he was blank
+and dark, like a bottomless abyss filled with thick fog. His hulking
+figure was driven by the wind to some boundless region where there was
+no shelter. He was driven by the wind to some boundless region where
+everything was coloured a dim grey, amorphous, terrible.
+
+The vision of an abyss, grey, without shape, swayed before his eyes as
+he strode northwards, moving uncertainly, staggering slightly, without
+guidance. His footsteps became slower. He came to a halt and looked
+about him curiously. He was under a railway bridge that crossed the
+street sideways over his head, encased in a black covering. A little
+dark laneway opened to his right. He walked three paces up the laneway
+and leaned his shoulder against the damp wall.
+
+There was shelter there. The wind did not come in. Only an odd gust
+swivelled around the corner and stirred the damp, musty air for a
+dying moment. It was quiet and dark, like the interior of a cave. He
+sighed.
+
+Gradually he grew composed. He grew calm and very weary. He wanted to
+lie down and go to sleep for a long, long time. There was no use
+struggling any farther. He was alone. The darkness of the night
+enveloped him.
+
+“There’s nobody here,” he murmured aloud.
+
+The ground was a puddle. The walls were blank. He felt with his feet,
+seeking a dry spot to lie down. Everywhere his boot sank into a
+puddle. He cursed and moved on a pace. He felt again with his feet.
+Still more puddles. He moved along still farther and tried again. No
+use. Then he began to walk along mechanically, feeling the ground at
+intervals. Then he kept walking slowly without feeling the ground. He
+had forgotten about lying down.
+
+He came to the end of the lane and saw a wide street in front of him.
+He halted excitedly.
+
+“Where am I going?” he cried aloud.
+
+He started at the sound of his voice and peered suspiciously over his
+shoulder. Of course there was nobody there. Then he steadied himself
+and tried to think of where he was and what had happened. It was a
+terrific struggle.
+
+Slowly he began to remember recent events. Fact after fact came
+prowling into his brain. Soon the whole series of events stood piled
+there in a crazy heap. Everything rushed towards that heap with
+increasing rapidity, but nothing could be abstracted from it. It was
+just as if the facts were sinking in a puddle and disappearing. It was
+utterly impossible for him to reason out a plan of action.
+
+“I must make a plan,” he murmured aloud.
+
+In answer to this exhortation came a vision of Gallagher’s glittering
+eyes. They fascinated him. He forgot about a plan. A horde of things
+crashed together in his brain making an infernal buzz. He lost control
+of himself and ran about under the archway, striking out with his
+hands and feet madly, trying to fight the cargo of things that were
+jammed together in his brain. It was that insensate rage that
+overcomes strong men at times, when they have nothing upon which to
+vent their fury, no physical opponent.
+
+He worked madly at this curious exercise for fully five minutes. Then
+he stopped, with perspiration streaming from his forehead. He felt
+better. His head was clear. He was again conscious of a grim
+determination to escape, to outwit those fellows who were on the
+Bridge. An idea that he thought amazingly cunning occurred to him, an
+idea to escape towards the south, by making a wide detour towards the
+north, up by the North Circular Road to Phœnix Park, then westwards
+through the Park, then southwards again by Dolphin’s Barn. He was
+toying with the route pleasantly when he was suddenly interrupted by a
+sound of feet.
+
+Trup, trap, trup, trap . . . came the sound of heavy feet coming down
+the street in front of him. Two policemen on their beat were coming
+along slowly, rattling door chains as they came. Gypo’s heart began to
+beat with terror. He thought they were looking for him. In his
+bewilderment he could not understand that he was now under police
+protection, an informer. He forgot that he had only to rush up to them
+and say that the Revolutionary Organization had condemned him to death
+and were now tracking him, in order to be taken to a police barracks,
+into safety. On the contrary, he still regarded them as his enemies.
+His mentality had not yet accustomed itself to the change that his
+going in the police-station that evening had wrought in his condition.
+To his understanding he was still a revolutionary. He was not at all
+conscious of being an informer, or a friend of law and order, a
+protégé of the police.
+
+He bolted headlong out of the laneway and clattered away across the
+street. He wheeled to the right, ran ten yards and then dived into
+another lane. He continued his flight without stopping. He ran without
+purpose, without guidance, driven northwards by panic and the
+impossibility of thought. He ran headlong in all directions, into a
+street, down its course, then to the left, back again in a parallel
+line, down once more the street he had left, passing several times the
+same corner in his mad flight. He ran desperately, as if he were
+chasing some elusive sprite that delighted in turning on its own
+tracks. He floundered through pools. He struggled on his hands and
+knees over waste plots. He crushed violently through holes in torn
+walls. He climbed over piles of bricks, over walls, jumped into
+backyards and then climbed back again into another street. He was
+scratched, covered with mud, dripping wet. His eyes were bloodshot.
+
+Then suddenly a clock struck the half-hour close by him. It was
+half-past four. He stopped dead, attracted by the tolling of the
+clock. It was not the sound but the remembrance it brought. He knew
+that clock. It was near Katie Fox’s house where he used to sleep. He
+stood in the middle of a narrow lane, with his legs wide apart and his
+chest and shoulders thrust forward listening to it. His lips were
+opened wide.
+
+He stood, like an uncouth, half-formed thing, alone in the half-grey
+shadows of the night, wondering at strange things.
+
+“It’s two turns from here,” he murmured, “first to the left, then to
+the right. She should be in be now. That must be three or four
+o’clock.”
+
+Now he moved carefully, listening for sounds and planting his feet
+lightly, close to the side of the lane. He turned to the left, went
+down fifty yards and then turned to the right. He entered a kind of
+circular square, a crescent, with a church standing in the middle. He
+moved around the crescent until he reached the other side of the
+church. There, at the corner of a little cul-de-sac, was the house in
+which Katie Fox had a room, about fifteen yards away from the church.
+
+All the houses in the little square were tenement houses, old, dusty
+and grey, tattered, sordid, with broken panes in their windows. Nearly
+all the street doors were ajar. There was nothing to steal within.
+
+Gypo deferentially tipped his hat to the church as he passed it. He
+entered the doorway of Katie Fox’s house. The hallway was pitch black.
+He stood for a few moments peering around in the darkness. Then he saw
+a night-light on the first landing. He recognized it as the light
+placed there every evening by Mrs. Delaney, who had become a religious
+maniac since her son was killed in the revolution of 1916. He had been
+killed while he was running along the streets, wounded, crying out for
+shelter.
+
+“If he ever comes home at night,” whispered Mrs. Delaney
+confidentially to everybody, “he’ll see the light burnin’ an’ he’ll
+know I’m in. God is good to His own people an’ He’ll look after me
+Johnny.”
+
+Gypo felt comforted at seeing the night-light. He moved noiselessly up
+the stairs until he reached it. When he was passing it, rounding the
+angle of the stairs, he paused, with his hand on the wooden banister
+and looked at it. For some reason or other he tiptoed towards it,
+leaned out when he was within two feet of it, and blew it out. Then he
+started and looked about him wildly. It was pitch dark again.
+
+“That’s better,” he said with a little sigh.
+
+He mounted the stairs steadily. They remained good until he reached
+the third floor. Then he had to move up a narrow, rickety, broken
+stairs to the top floor, where Katie Fox had a room. He made an awful
+noise, but it disturbed nobody. He heard a child crying when he got
+near the top of the stairs. The child belonged to Tim Flanagan, an
+unemployed man, who occupied the opposite room to Katie Fox on the top
+landing. He lived there with his wife and three children. The baby had
+the measles and the other two children were awake. One child was
+laughing. Gypo could distinguish Flanagan’s weak, timorous voice,
+trying to soothe the children.
+
+Gypo stood outside the door to the left, Katie Fox’s door. He
+listened. A shaft of light streamed through the keyhole and through a
+large, round hole in the bottom of the door. A large piece of the door
+had been gnawed away by a stray dog that Katie Fox brought home one
+night. He bit his way out of the room as soon as he got a meal. Gypo
+listened. Katie Fox was talking within. Gypo knocked.
+
+“Who’s that?”
+
+“It’s only me, Katie. Open the door.”
+
+“Mother o’ Mercy,” she screeched, “it’s his ghost. It’s his ghost,
+Louisa. Louisa, will ye hide me somewhere, for God’s sake!”
+
+“Ghost yer gran’mother,” came a cracked, old voice. “Get up an’ open
+the door will ye, till we see what he wants.”
+
+“No, no—” began Katie’s voice again.
+
+Gypo put his shoulder to the door, burst the piece of string that
+fastened it on the inside to a nail in the wall, and flung the door
+open wide. He stalked into the room.
+
+At first the whole room appeared to be a blue bank of fog. Then the
+blue mist dissipated gradually. The room assumed proportions. Things
+swam out of the mist towards him gracefully, in the order of their
+importance. First came the lamp. It was placed on the black, wooden
+mantelpiece over the fireplace. It was an ordinary tin paraffin lamp,
+painted red. The chimney was three-parts black. Next came the
+fireplace. There was a huge, open grate, with a turf fire burning in
+it. The fire was more like the remains of a funeral pyre, because the
+ashes had accumulated for weeks. The flaming peat sods lay stretched
+like fallen logs on the top of the great pile of yellow ashes. Next
+came the bed, with Louisa Cummins lying in one corner of it.
+
+The bed was so huge that it might be mistaken for anything were it not
+supported by four thick wooden posts and had a canopy over it, at the
+head, after the fashion of those beds that are called in Irish country
+places “Archbishops’ Beds.” The bed-clothes were indescribable.
+Everything was pitched on to the bed and everything stayed there.
+Louisa Cummins lived in the bed most of the day. She had done so for
+eight years, since she became “bedridden” as the result of “injuries”
+received from the police, one night she was arrested on a charge of
+trafficking in immorality. She was quite strong and healthy. She did
+all her work in bed. The blankets were gathered about her bulky person
+in the far corner, near the wall. In the other corner, Katie Fox’s
+corner, there was a couple or so of tattered blankets. The foot of the
+bed was heaped with junk of all sorts, from a notched mug, out of
+which the old lady drank her tea, to a statue of Saint Joseph that
+hung on the bed-post, suspended from a thick nail by a rough, knotted
+cord. The cord was around the statue’s neck, in a noose. The statue
+was not suspended there out of crude respect, as might be supposed. It
+was hung there as a blasphemous protest against the incompetence of
+the saint. Four years before she had made a Novena to Saint Joseph,
+requesting a cure for muscular rheumatism, and because her request was
+not granted she hung up the statue by the neck.
+
+When Gypo’s eyes found her through the fog, she was hidden to the chin
+beneath a pile of blankets and clothes of all sorts, up against the
+wall. She lay on her side, with her white, shrivelled head ensconced
+in a grey pillow, that had no case to cover it. The feathers protruded
+from the pillow. The old woman’s white hair was strewn about the
+pillow and the bed-clothes, like strands of seaweed floating on the
+surface of a shallow sea at low tide. Her mouth was wide open, in an
+ogreish fashion, displaying red gums and four yellow teeth, cropping
+up at unequal distances along her jaws; four, crooked, yellow fangs.
+
+Her eyes alone showed life and intelligence. They were small, fierce,
+blue eyes, blazing with cunning and avarice.
+
+Her body, hidden beneath the clothes, resembled a mountain that had
+been reduced to a shapeless pulp by concussion.
+
+Gypo surveyed her without any emotion. Then he looked around for
+Katie. He saw her standing in the corner behind the door. She was
+still dressed as he had met her in the public-house early in the
+evening. But her dress had become dishevelled. Her face had changed.
+It had changed in a strange manner. It had lost the careworn, pinched
+expression. Her eyes were no longer tired. Her face was flushed and
+full. The skin was loose. The mouth was firm, with a voluptuous
+softness in the lips. Her eyes flashed bright. They had the calm
+aggressiveness of healthy, energetic women, who are passing from one
+success to another, the calm, aggressive flash of satisfied desire and
+of vaulting ambition. While, in spite of all that, her hands,
+clutching her throat, trembled in apparent terror, in contradiction to
+the repose and vitality of her face. Her feet, too, danced
+spasmodically.
+
+“What’s the matter with ye, Katie?” said Gypo. “What’s that ye were
+sayin’ about me ghost?”
+
+He spoke in a hoarse, morose whisper.
+
+“God!” exclaimed Katie.
+
+She took her hands away from her throat and clasped them behind her
+back, with the movement of one offered an objectionable thing. Then
+she fled to the fire at great speed. She leaned her back against the
+wall to the right of the fireplace and gaped at Gypo. She motioned to
+him with her head.
+
+“Shut that door,” she said in a whisper. “Shut the door and come in.”
+
+Gypo turned to the door silently and began to tie the two pieces of
+broken string to fasten it once more.
+
+“Where have ye ben?” she whispered. “O, Lord! Ye put the heart
+crosswise in me.”
+
+Gypo tied the door and stalked slowly and quietly to the hearth. He
+stood still, glanced towards the old woman and then looked with open
+lips at Katie.
+
+“They’re after me, Katie,” he muttered with a shudder.
+
+There was a silence. Gypo shuddered again and sat down in front of the
+fire. He sat on the floor, with his elbows resting on his knees,
+stretching out his hands to the blaze.
+
+Katie looked at him with glittering eyes. She stood against the wall,
+motionless. Her face had very white beneath her crumpled red hat. Her
+eyes glittered. Her upper lip was gathered together, frilled.
+
+The old woman in the bed glanced from Gypo to Katie and from Katie to
+Gypo. Her eyes danced with merriment. She kept cuddling herself, as if
+in an ecstasy of enjoyment.
+
+“What are ye talkin’ about?” said Katie at length.
+
+“Th’ Organization is after me,” he muttered without looking at her.
+“Commandant Gallagher is goin’ to plug me. I escaped outa the cell in
+the Bogey Hole.”
+
+“What are they goin’ to plug ye for? In the name o’ goodness, what are
+they goin’ to plug ye for?”
+
+Katie Fox’s voice was cold and passionless, but Gypo did not notice.
+She had a queer, thin smile on her lips, but Gypo did not look at her
+face. She had a flashing light in her eyes as she spoke, but Gypo had
+not seen it. He was staring dreamily into the fire. He was tired out
+and sleepy. There was no use keeping watch any longer. He was tired,
+tired, tired. Tired and sleepy. What was the use of keeping watch any
+longer? Sleep, sleep, sleep. Then he would go straight to the south.
+He would rush to the south with the wind, through all obstacles.
+Sleep, sleep, sleep.
+
+“It doesn’t matter what they’re after me for,” he muttered.
+
+There was another silence.
+
+Sleep, sleep, sleep.
+
+“They want to get me outa their way,” he mumbled again. “But they’re
+not goin’ to get me. Katie, I’m goin’ to flop here for the night. I’ll
+stay till to-morrow night. Then I’m going south. Here’s all the money
+I have.”
+
+He rummaged in his trousers pocket and brought out on his palm four
+shillings and sixpence. He handed it to her. She approached and held
+out her right hand for it, with a mincing movement.
+
+“Gimme that money. Gimme that money,” screamed the old woman from the
+bed. She struggled to sit up.
+
+“You shut up, Louisa,” growled Gypo, half turning towards her across
+his shoulder. “Shut up or I’ll flatten ye.”
+
+The old woman collapsed, grinning. Then she caught up a stick that lay
+beside her in the bed. She shook the stick at Katie Fox.
+
+“She robs me, she robs me,” she wailed, in a thin, cracked voice.
+
+“I’ll sleep here on the floor, Katie,” said Gypo. “Hey, Katie. I’ll
+sleep here in front o’ the fire. Katie, what’s the matter with ye? Why
+don’t ye talk to me?” Katie burst into laughter. She had sat down on a
+low stool to the left of the fire on receiving the money. Now she
+jumped to her feet and laughed. It was a queer, dry laugh. There was a
+dreamy look in her eyes. She looked at the floor, wrapped in thought.
+
+“Are ye drunk or what’s the matter with ye?” grumbled Gypo.
+
+“There’s nothin’ at all the matter with me,” murmured Katie dreamily,
+still looking at the floor.
+
+Then she drew in a deep breath and shrugged herself. She became alive
+and energetic again, wide awake, with piercing eyes. She began to talk
+at an amazing speed, with her arms crossed on her breasts.
+
+“Sure, Gypo,” she said in a loud, hilarious voice, “ye can sleep here
+till the crack o’ doom if ye like. Sure enough, Connemara Maggie tole
+me about Bartly Mulholland comin’ lookin’ for ye. She came into Biddy
+Burke’s as drunk as a lord, an’ she outs with a yarn about Bartly
+puttin’ a gun to ye’ head an’ drivin’ ye up the street in front o’
+him.”
+
+“Yer a liar, she didn’t,” growled Gypo, starting slightly.
+
+“Maybe she didn’t say that exactly,” continued Katie, “but——”
+
+“Did she give ye a quid I gave her to give ye?”
+
+“A quid? Did ye give her a quid for me? Well, of all the liars! Well,
+of all the robbers! Of all the dirty sons of pock-faced tailors! She
+takes the cooked biscuit. Troth then, she only gev me ten bob an’ I
+had to fight her for that. O’ course I’m sayin’ nothin’ about things I
+might say a lot about, but——”
+
+“Oh! less o’ yer gab,” growled Gypo, feeling behind him on the floor
+with his hand. “I’m not in humour for yer gab, Katie.”
+
+“Don’t lie on the floor,” she cried solicitously. “Get into the bed.
+Lie in my corner. Don’t mind, Louisa. The corner is mine. I can let
+who I like int’ it. Louisa, if ye don’t lie still I’ll lave ye for
+dead as sure as Our Lord was crucified. So I will. Well what could ye
+expect? An’ I’m sayin’ nothin’ now, Gypo, seein’ the position yer in,
+but it’s the price o’ ye all the same. I hope ye don’t mind me
+speakin’ me mind out. It’s the price o’ ye for lavin’ them that were
+kind to ye, an’ throwin’ yer money away on a strap like that. But sure
+me poor mother used to say, Lord have mercy on her——”
+
+“Get outa here, get outa here,” screamed the old woman, waving her
+stick.
+
+Gypo had thrown himself on the bed on his back. The old lady began to
+beat him feebly about the body with her stick. He took no notice of
+her. He fumbled with the heap of tattered blankets, arranging them
+about his legs.
+
+Katie Fox caught up the tongs and approached the bed sideways, making
+furtive signs to the old woman, urging her secretly to keep quiet.
+
+The old woman subsided, muttering something. Katie went back to the
+fire and put down the tongs. She continued to talk. She was rapidly
+becoming more excited. Her eyes had now a look of insanity in them.
+Her lips were constantly becoming wreathed with smiles, after the
+manner of a lunatic who is thinking of some demoniac buffoonery in his
+muddled brain.
+
+“Though few people know it,” she cried arrogantly, looking at the
+door, while she put a cigarette in her mouth, “me poor mother was a
+born lady. Put that in yer pipe, Louisa Cummins, and try an’ smoke it.
+Yev given me dog’s abuse since I came into yer rotten pigsty of a
+room, but still an’ all ye know yer not fit to wipe me shoes. So I
+don’t give a damn.”
+
+“Yerra, d’ye hear her, d’ye hear her?” croaked Louisa Cummins.
+
+She began to laugh, making a noise in her throat like a hen, that
+quaint, cunning, querulous sound, that a hen makes at night, when
+disturbed during her roosting hours.
+
+Gypo had arranged the clothes to his satisfaction. The blankets
+covered his body up to his chest. His eyes began to close. His little,
+round hat still remained on his head, crushed down over his forehead.
+There was a continual murmur in his brain. The sounds, the talk, the
+smells about him no longer had any meaning.
+
+Sleep, sleep, sleep.
+
+Danger, fear, everything was forgotten, but his desire to sleep.
+
+Sleep, sleep, sleep.
+
+“Yerrah, is it an informer I’m lyin’ beside?” screamed the old woman
+again, trying to rise with fury. “Get out, get out. There’s blood on
+yer hands. There’s——”
+
+“Lie down or I’ll brain ye,” hissed Katie, rushing once more to the
+bed.
+
+With a weary sigh Gypo stretched out his left hand and dropped it
+across the body of the old woman. She subsided under the weight of the
+massive hand. It lay across her, relaxed and tired. She peered at it
+curiously, around the edge of her blankets. Maybe she peered at it in
+terror. Who knows what emotions were concealed behind that hideous
+skull?
+
+Gypo did not look at her. His eyes were almost closed. His nostrils
+were expanding and contracting noiselessly.
+
+Sleep, sleep, sleep.
+
+Then a mad rush to the mountains.
+
+Sleep, sleep, sleep.
+
+“Blast it for a story,” cried Katie Fox, stamping on the floor.
+
+She walked to the middle of the floor. Then she folded her arms and
+stood with her legs wide apart and her chest thrown out, gazing at the
+dim wall with glittering eyes. She threw back her head and laughed.
+
+“Amn’t I the fool?” she cried. “Oh! amn’t I the fool? Me that could
+walk with the finest men in the land! Do ye know that me gran’father
+was the Duke o’ Clonliffey? Do ye know that? An’ me mother was related
+to royalty on her father’s side. Not to the King of England either,
+but to me bould King o’ Spain, where they grow oranges an’ ye can
+drink wine out of a well like water from the Shannon. Sure it’s there
+where I was born an’ reared, in a palace as big as the County
+Waterford, with archbishops waitin’ at table on me, with red napkins
+on their arms, an’ a rale lady——”
+
+“Yerrah, will ye hould yer whist,” piped the old woman.
+
+She tried to brandish her stick and to disengage herself from the hand
+that lay on top of her. But the hand stiffened for a moment. She was
+pressed down beneath it. Then the hand relaxed again.
+
+Sleep, sleep, sleep.
+
+Gypo’s eyes opened wide for a moment. Then he closed them. Everything
+in his mind became a blur. Nightmares stood massed in his brain ready
+to rush in on the platform of his sleeping mind and carry on their mad
+acting, as soon as his being soared off, bound in sleep. He had
+already surrendered to these nightmares.
+
+Sleep, sleep, sleep.
+
+Katie Fox looked at him cunningly for a moment. Her face hardened and
+her eyes narrowed to points. Then she glanced away again, towards the
+wall. Her lower lip dropped. Her eyes distended. She puffed twice at
+her cigarette. She began to talk again.
+
+“I could tell ye stories about them all, Gypo,” she cried, waving her
+arm wildly in Gypo’s direction. “I could tell ye, so I could, but
+what’s the use of tellin’? Wha’? What’s the use of anythin’? An’ Fr.
+Conroy refused to give me absolution. Well, he can go to hell. I can
+get along without his absolution. I’m not afraid o’ hell. Oh, Mother
+o’ Mercy!” she cried, suddenly crossing herself; “what have I said?
+What——”
+
+“Ha! Cross yersel’, cross yersel’,” croaked Louisa Cummins. “But it’s
+no good to ye. Down ye’ll go. Down ye’ll go. Ha, ha, ha!”
+
+“There’s a curse on me family, Louisa, since me second cousin the
+Duchess of . . . of . . . of . . . where is that place she was Duchess
+of? . . . I forget it, although I was there often with me mother. It’s
+somewhere out be Killiney. Well, she put a curse on me family anyway.
+She used to have thirteen monkeys sittin’ at the breakfast table with
+her.”
+
+“Yer a liar, yer a liar,” cried the old woman in a sudden fury. “She
+couldn’t have thirteen monkeys. She couldn’t have thirteen. It’s them
+drugs yer takin’ that’s gone to yer head. Thirteen! Foo!”
+
+Gypo mumbled something in a tremendous whisper. Both women looked at
+him. His lips were moving, but the words were unintelligible. His
+massive chest heaved up to an enormous extent and collapsed again
+slowly, with a great outrush of breath from the nostrils. His tawny
+face stood out impassively in the glimmer of the firelight. It looked
+sorrowful and oppressed.
+
+Sleep, sleep, sleep.
+
+He was wafted away by heavy gusts of sleep, to the thunderous music of
+fantastic nightmares. Primeval memories assumed form in the clouds of
+sleep that pressed down about him. They assumed form and shape, the
+shape of the beings that pursued him.
+
+Sleep, sleep, sleep.
+
+His strength was becoming unbound, dissolved in sleep, loosened out
+and swaying limply on vapours of sleep.
+
+Sleep, sleep, sleep.
+
+“D’ye know what I’m goin’ to tell ye, Louisa?” continued Katie in a
+low, hushed voice. “When I’m dead they’re goin’ to canonize me. Then
+I’ll have a holy well out on the Malahide Road, an’ I’ll put a spell
+on everybody I don’t like, an’ make them get up in the middle o’ the
+night, an’ walk out barefoot to the well, to drink three cupfuls o’
+the holy water. An’ never knowin’ that I’ll have it poisoned. This is
+a queer world, Louisa, an’ ye’ll soon be out of it, ’cos yer——”
+
+“Sorra a fear o’ me,” croaked the old woman. “I’ll dance on yer grave.
+Ye little rip o’ divilment. Yer not the first nor the fifth that has
+come into me house this ten years an’ gone the same road. No yer not.
+An’ ye won’t be the last. Oho! Ye all got pretty faces. Ye all get the
+fine strong men to kiss ye. But old, dirty-faced Louisa Cummins ’ll
+dance on yer graves. She dances on yer graves. So she does. Now what
+are ye doin’ with him? Are ye puttin’ yer evil spell on him? Informer
+an’ all that he is, I’ll not let ye put yer evil spell on him. I’ll
+not let ye do that. Go away from the bed.”
+
+Katie had come to the bed and had bent down with her left ear to
+Gypo’s face, listening to his breathing. She raised her face to look
+at the old woman.
+
+“He’s dead asleep,” she whispered with a smile.
+
+“Well? Is that queer?”
+
+“Don’t wake him while I’m gone, Louisa.”
+
+“Where are ye goin’?”
+
+“Mind yer own business, Louisa. I’m givin’ ye warnin’.”
+
+“Is it to the polis yer goin’?”
+
+“Don’t talk so loud. It’s not to the polis I’m goin’. I’m just goin’
+out.”
+
+“Ha! Yer goin’ to inform on him ye rip o’ divilment. Yer goin’ to
+inform on him.”
+
+“It’s nothin’ o’ the kind. Isn’t he an informer? Don’t make a noise.
+Don’t waken him or they’ll fill ye full o’ lead when they come. I’m
+givin’ ye this warnin’. Shut up.”
+
+She moved backwards to the door, with her hand held out threateningly
+towards the old woman. The old woman looked after her. Her mouth was
+wide open. Her eyes roamed about. Then Katie disappeared out the door.
+Her shoes went tapping down the stairs. The banisters creaked. The
+room was still, except for Gypo’s heavy breathing.
+
+The old woman remained motionless for several seconds, looking towards
+the door. Then she groped for her stick and tried to rouse Gypo with
+it. But Gypo’s arm still lay across her body holding it down. In his
+sleep it stiffened and held her down. She peered at it and frowned.
+She dropped the stick and smiled.
+
+“Ha!” she gurgled, “she’s gone to inform on ye, me fine boyo. They’ll
+soon be here after ye. Trust a woman, trust a devil. She’ll be the
+ruin o’ ye, me bould warrior. An’ many’s the fine strappin’ woman from
+yer own country would give her two eyes for a night with ye. An’ here
+ye lie, asleep an’ weak, with the weariness o’ death on ye. Ha! The
+divil mend the lot o’ ye. Ha! There ye are now. Ha! There ye are now
+an’ be damned to ye. Ha! Ha!”
+
+Sleep, sleep, sleep.
+
+Sleep and strange dreams.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+At sixteen minutes to six, Mulholland rushed down the stairs into the
+Bogey Hole, shouting in a hushed whisper all the way:
+
+“Commandant, Commandant, we have him, we have him!”
+
+Gallagher rushed to the stairway. He found Mulholland grasping the
+wall with one hand, with his cap in the other hand, panting, with
+perspiration rolling down his cheeks in drops.
+
+“It was Katie Fox,” he gasped. “She came runnin’ down Mount William
+Road: Charlie Carrol headed her off. She tole him Gypo was up in her
+room, in bed. No. 61 Mount William Crescent. Captain Burton has got
+the house surrounded. He sent me up for orders.”
+
+“Katie Fox?” said Gallagher. “I thought she was——”
+
+“She’s mad with dope.”
+
+“I see. Double back and tell Burton I’ll be down immediately. Don’t
+move till I arrive.”
+
+“All right, Commandant.”
+
+Mulholland raced up the stairs again. Gallagher rushed back to the
+witnesses’ room. Mary McPhillip had fallen into a doze. He roused her.
+
+“Come on, Mary,” he whispered. “We are going now. We found him.”
+
+“Who? What? Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Who did you find?”
+
+“The informer. Gypo Nolan. We found him at 61 Mount William Crescent.
+I am going there now. Come along. Then I’ll leave you home.”
+
+She was waking up gradually, frightened and rubbing her eyes.
+Gallagher fidgeted excitedly, trying to get her to her feet.
+
+“What time is it?” she asked.
+
+“A quarter to six.”
+
+“Heavens above! Mother will be gone to Mass before I get home.”
+
+“What does it matter?”
+
+“Of course it matters. I was to have gone with her this morning. For
+Frankie.”
+
+“Where does she go to Mass?”
+
+“Mount William Crescent.”
+
+“Well, we’re going there, too. You can go into the chapel and meet her
+there.”
+
+“Why? What’s at Mount William Crescent?”
+
+She was fully awake now and had got to her feet, wild eyed.
+
+Gallagher got angry and swore. He stamped his feet.
+
+“Come on quickly. I have no time. I tell you the informer has been
+found. He is at Mount William Crescent. I’m going down there. Come
+along.”
+
+“You’re going to murder him,” she gasped, with her bosom heaving.
+
+“Murder be damned!” cried Gallagher. “We’re going to wipe him out.”
+
+“You’re a beast. You’re not going to murder him, not while I can
+prevent it.”
+
+She rushed from the room. With a fierce oath he rushed after her. He
+caught her at the foot of the stairs. The sentries rushed up. She kept
+screaming and striking out with her clawing hands.
+
+“Keep her here,” he hissed. “Don’t let her out on any account for an
+hour. Then let her off and get home. Good-bye.” He looked fiercely
+into Mary’s eyes. His face was ashen with rage. “We spare neither man
+nor woman. Remember that.”
+
+Then he rushed up the stairs.
+
+“Murderer, murderer,” she cried after him, until they stuffed her
+mouth.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+Shapeless figures dancing on tremendous stilts, on the brink of an
+abyss, to the sound of rocks being tumbled about below, in the
+darkness, everything immense and dark and resounding, everything
+without shape or meaning, gloom and preponderance, yawning, yawning
+abysses full of frozen fog, cliffs gliding away when touched, leaving
+no foundation, an endless wandering through space, through screeching
+winds and . . . crash.
+
+Gypo awoke with a snort, perspiring with his nightmare, terrified.
+
+The old woman had at last awakened him by squeezing his nostrils
+between her fingers. He sat up, looked about him and saw her. He saw
+her weird and pale, with her white hair streaming. He was going to
+strike her in terror, thinking her an ogre from his dreams, when she
+spoke.
+
+“They’re after ye,” she hissed. “They’re after ye. They’re on the
+stairs.”
+
+He listened. There was nothing. Not a sound. What? Just a whistle of
+the wind on the roof. Ha! Something creaked. Was it the bed? No. Trup,
+trip, r-r-rip. Somebody had slipped on the roof.
+
+Gypo bounded from the bed to the floor in one leap. He stood
+motionless, crouching forward, panting, with dilated nostrils. A sound
+came on the stairs outside the door. Somebody on the stairs said:
+“Hist!” Then utter silence. Gypo stood transfixed, still wet with the
+perspiration of his nightmare.
+
+Then he moved noiselessly to the fireplace and picked up the tongs. It
+slipped from his fingers as he rose and rattled to the stone hearth.
+He whirled about to the door with an oath. Simultaneously the door was
+flung wide with a bang. Three flashes of light came before his eyes
+from the doorway. As he rushed headlong towards them there was a
+deafening roar. Three men had fired together at him. Then there was
+chaos.
+
+As he dashed across the floor to the landing, he felt a sting like
+frost-bite in his thigh. Then he saw their terror-stricken, mad faces.
+He recognized two of them, Mulholland and Hackett. The third man was
+Curley. When he closed with them and felt his giant hands on the soft
+warm flesh of their bodies he breathed a sigh of satisfaction.
+
+Somebody fired again, unintentionally, in the struggling mass on the
+landing. It must have been Curley. For his thin voice screamed
+querulously after the explosion, “God have mercy on my soul!” Gypo
+smelt burning under his armpit as his head was bent down to mobilize
+his spine strength.
+
+Then the banister gave way with a crash of breaking wood. The four men
+went down, without a cry. Their fists thudded with dull sounds as they
+struck blindly at one another in the dark.
+
+They fell on the next landing. Gypo and Mulholland were on top.
+Mulholland had his right knee on Curley’s back. He was cool with the
+mania of death-terror. He bared his teeth and raised his pistol to
+fire into Gypo’s open mouth. But Gypo rammed him with his monstrous
+head.
+
+Mulholland was hurled backwards like a gymnast, head over heels, heels
+over head. He brought up on a black sheepskin carpet outside a
+tenement door in the far corner. He lay with his knees to his chin,
+perfectly quiet. The pistol shot splashed through the whitewashed
+woodwork of the ceiling. The pistol jingled to the floor.
+
+Gypo scraped around on his hands and knees in the darkness. He groped
+for the two men who lay beneath him. He felt their rumps, their backs,
+their thighs, in a wide sweep of his hands. Their bodies were lax and
+soft, like the carcasses of dead things. One of them sighed and turned
+over. Gypo rose to his feet. Without looking anywhere he rushed for
+the stairs and leaped down.
+
+Half-way down the last flight he paused and tried to think. But he
+drew his hand over his eyes and shook his head.
+
+“It’s no use. It’s no use,” he said aloud.
+
+There was a great din of disturbed people in the house above him.
+
+He reached the hallway. Through the open door he could see the street
+outside. The dawn had come. The air was grey, cold, empty and silent.
+He marched steadily to the door. His body was very cold. And his mind
+was dead. Cold and dead. Dead and cold.
+
+A stream of red blood trickled down over his right boot from the wound
+in his thigh. Another stream trickled along his right ribs. He did not
+know. He was cold and dead. Dead and very cold.
+
+He stopped in the doorway. His eyes expanded. A last passion made his
+body rigid. He roared. He had seen Gallagher standing against the
+church railings across the road, with his hands in his raincoat
+pockets, smiling insolently.
+
+Gypo descended the five steps to the street at one bound. Then as his
+right foot landed on the pavement there was a rapid succession of
+shots. They came from all sides. Three of them entered his body.
+Without bringing his left foot to the pavement he jumped again into
+the air, with his two hands reaching out and his face turned upwards,
+in the earnest attitude of a symbolic dancer.
+
+He hurtled out into the street, hopping on staggering feet, writhing
+and contorting. Then he fell to his knees. He groaned and fell prone.
+
+He struggled up again, looking wildly around him, holding his bowels
+with his hands. Gallagher was there in front of him, smiling dreamily
+now, with distant, melancholy eyes.
+
+Gallagher shrugged himself and turned away sharply to the right.
+
+Gypo wanted to go after him. But he no longer knew why he wanted to go
+after him. His eyes were getting dim. His body was cold. Cold and
+dead.
+
+Grinding his teeth he got to his feet. He threw out his chest,
+shrugged his shoulders and walked ahead like a drunken man. He walked
+slowly straight ahead, straight, stiff, swinging his limp hands
+slowly.
+
+He walked through the iron gateway of the church, along the concrete
+path to the door. He had to crawl up the steps on his knees. Blood was
+coming up his throat.
+
+Reverently he dipped his hand into the holy-water font. He wet his
+hand to the wrist. He tried to take off his hat in order to cross
+himself. His hand pawed about his skull, but his fingers were already
+dead. They could not grip the tattered hat. He tried to cross himself.
+Impossible. His hand could not reach his forehead. It went up half-way
+and then fell lifelessly. It was a ton weight. He strode to the left.
+He staggered through a narrow Roman door. He was in the church.
+
+It was a great high room, curtained with silence. At the altar, away
+in the lamp-lit dimness of the dawn, a priest was saying Mass. The
+droning sound of the words came down the silent church, peaceful,
+laden with the quaint odour of mystery, the mysterious calm of souls
+groping after infinite things. All round the church the people knelt
+with bent heads and faces wrapt in prayer for infinite things. Sad,
+haggard, hungry faces wrapt in the contemplation of infinity, wafted
+out of the sordidness of their lives by the contemplation of infinite
+things.
+
+Peace and silence and the quaint odour of mystery and of infinite
+things.
+
+Deep, long, soft words murmured endlessly in a silent place. Mystery
+and the phantoms of death breathing faint breaths.
+
+Mercy and pity. Pity and peace. Pity and mercy and peace, three
+eternal gems in the tabernacle of life, burnished ceaselessly with
+human dust.
+
+From dust to dust.
+
+Gypo’s eyes roamed around the church. His eyes were very dim. There
+was a blur before them. He thought he saw somebody whom he knew. He
+was not sure. Yes. They were looking at him. There, on the left, on
+the other side of the aisle. It was a long way off. What? Frankie
+McPhillip’s mother!
+
+He set out, with a great sigh, towards her. He fell in a heap in front
+of her seat. He raised his head to her face. He saw her face, a great,
+white, sad face, with tears running down the fat cheeks. He struggled
+to his knees in the aisle before her. People were rushing to him
+talking. He waved his hands to keep them away. It was very dark. He
+swallowed the blood in his mouth and he cried out in a thick whisper:
+
+“Mrs. McPhillip, ’twas I informed on yer son Frankie. Forgive me. I’m
+dyin’.”
+
+“I forgive ye,” she sighed in a sad, soft whisper. “Ye didn’t know
+what ye were doin’.”
+
+He shivered from head to foot and bowed his head.
+
+He felt a great mad rush of blood to his head. A great joy filled him.
+He became conscious of infinite things.
+
+Pity and mercy and peace and the phantoms of death breathing faint
+breaths. Mercy and pity and peace.
+
+“Lemme go!” he cried, struggling to his feet.
+
+He stood up straight, in all the majesty of his giant stature,
+towering over all, erect and majestic, with his limbs like pillars,
+looking towards the altar.
+
+He cried out in a loud voice:
+
+“Frankie, yer mother has forgiven me.”
+
+Then with a gurgling sound he fell forward on his face. His hat rolled
+off. Blood gushed from his mouth. He stretched out his limbs in the
+shape of a cross. He shivered and lay still.
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
+
+This transcription follows the text of the edition published by Alfred
+A. Knopf in 1925. However, the following words have been changed from
+the original text to correct what are believed to be unambiguous
+printing errors.
+
+ * “_recontre_” was changed to “_rencontre_” (Chapter I).
+ * “Your as bad” was changed to “You’re as bad” (Chapter III).
+ * “stood at east” was changed to “stood at ease” (Chapter III).
+ * “awkard” was changed to “awkward” (Chapter IV).
+ * “ridicul-ulous” was changed to “ridiculous” (Chapter VII).
+ * “It it” was changed to “Is it” (Chapter VIII).
+ * “its less” was changed to “it’s less” (Chapter XI).
+ * “for out” was changed to “far out” (Chapter XI).
+ * “sang into” was changed to “sank into” (Chapter XI).
+ * “a think like” was changed to “a thing like” (Chapter XII).
+ * “banis-ister” was changed to “banister” (Chapter XVI).
+ * Five occurrences of mismatched quotation marks were repaired.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75583 ***